How can I trim the carriage return from text that is being piped in bash?

Question

I'm using this command to get my last typed command:

history | cut -c 8- | tail -n 2 | head -n 1

It works very well in bash, removing the line numbers, but there is one problem I have with it, (er, annoyance, because I want just the command) and I'm piping this to the xsel clipboard manager:

It also grabs the trailing new line / carriage return...

I know in some shells you can use:

echo "text \c"

I'm not sure how to incorporate that into bash though.

Extra points for the solution that is easiest to type on the fly :)

Solution

If I am reading your question correctly, you need to remove the trailing newline. Try this perl bit: `perl -ne 'chomp and print'

Examples:

[root@talara test]# ls -la
total 20
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 4096 Jun  7 21:30 .
dr-xr-x---. 28 root root 4096 Jun  8 08:42 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    0 Jun  7 15:10 FILE1
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 4096 Jun  7 14:49 ham
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   36 Jun  7 21:31 t
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   11 Jun  7 16:21 test

[root@talara test]# ls -la | perl -ne 'chomp and print'
total 20drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 4096 Jun  7 21:30 .dr-xr-x---. 28 root root 4096 Jun  8 08:42 ..-rw-r--r--   1 root root    0 Jun  7 15:10 FILE1drwxr-xr-x   3 root root 4096 Jun  7 14:49 ham-rw-r--r--   1 root root   36 Jun  7 21:31 t-rw-r--r--   1 root root   11 Jun  7 16:21 test

And to make it easy for typing over and over and on the fly you can make an alias: alias chomp="perl -ne 'chomp and print'"