Today I ran into the scenario where I want to use bash/zsh to remove the file extension from a string. I wanted to read in the filename, then create a directory based on the filename. If you copy/paste the following into your terminal, you should see it work.

filename="somefilename.wav"
echo ${filename%.*}

Or if you’re using it inside of a zsh function and passing in a parameter:

removeExtension(){
  echo ${1%.*}
}

Whereas you would usually use $1 to read the parameter, this time we’re using the substituation syntax to both read and remove the . and everything after.