How to add last 10 character after truncating the string

Question

I'm trying to do it with multi lines

words="
What do you think about the kitten outside?
The tattered work gloves speak of the many hours of hard labor he endured throughout his life.
Hello
Hi
"

I used cut -c -17 to truncate it.
I'm trying to output it like this:

What do you think...n outside?
The tattered work... his life.
Hello
Hi

Sorry i'm still noob in bash scripting... thanks

Answer 1

Continuing from the comment, you can read each line separately and figure out the suffix length (if less than 10) as follows

#!/bin/bash

words="
What do you think about the kitten outside?
The tattered work gloves speak of the many hours of hard labor he endured throughout his life.
Hello
Hi
"

while read line; do                           # loop reading each line
  len=${#line}                                # get line length
  [ "$len" -eq 0 ] && continue                # if zero len, get next line
  suffix=0                                    # set suffix length 0
  [ "$len" -gt 17 ] && suffix=$((len - 17))   # get max suffix length
  [ "$suffix" -ge 10 ] && suffix=10           # if > 10, set to 10
  printf "%s" "${line:0:17}"                  # output first 17 chars
  if [ "$suffix" -gt 0 ]; then                # if suffix > 0, output
    printf "...%s\n" "${line: -$suffix}"
  else                                        # otherwise output \n
    printf "\n"
  fi
    
done <<< $words        # feed loop with "herestring" from words

Note: [ ... ] && do_something is just shorthand for if [ ... ]; then do_something; fi. You can use the same shorthand with || as well. But, avoid chaining [ ... ] && do_something || do_something_else as the || will be executed if the first part fails for any reason. (so it isn't a shortcut for if [...]; then ... else; fi)

Example Use/Output

$ ./prefixsuffix.sh
What do you think...n outside?
The tattered work... his life.
Hello
Hi