Remove everything in a pipe delimited file after second-to-last pipe

Question

How can remove everything in a pipe delimited file after the second-to-last pipe? Like for the line

David|3456|ACCOUNT|MALFUNCTION|CANON|456

the result should be

David|3456|ACCOUNT|MALFUNCTION

Answer 1

Using awk, something like

awk -F'|' 'BEGIN{OFS="|"}{NF=NF-2; print}' inputfile
David|3456|ACCOUNT|MALFUNCTION

(or) use cut if you know the number of columns in total, i,e 6 -> 4

cut -d'|' -f -4 inputfile
David|3456|ACCOUNT|MALFUNCTION

Answer 2

The command I would use is

cat input.txt | sed -r 's/(.*)\|.*/\1/' > output.txt

Answer 3

Replace |(string without pipe)|(string without pipe) at the end of each line:

sed 's/|[^|]*|[^|]*$//' inputfile

Answer 4

A pure Bash solution:

while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n $line ]] ; do
    printf '%s\n' "${line%|*|*}"
done <inputfile

See Reading input files by line using read command in shell scripting skips last line (particularly the answer by Jahid) for details of how the while loop works.

See pattern matching in Bash for information about ${line%|*|*}.