how about something like:

YOURVARIABLE=`cat file | cut -d "." -f 1 | cut -c 2-`

This willbreak if there was a sentence in the middle of the first
sentence, like "Hello my name is Mr. Lievertz.", so its far from
perfect.

Quoting Dan Trevino <[log in to unmask]>:

> I need to parse a tab delimited text file of several thousand lines. The
> first part is easy;
>
> cut -f8 file
>
> field 8 of this file contains multiple, variable length, sentences enclosed
> in double quotes. Example returned by the cut command above:
>
> "this is sentence one. this i sentence two. this ""is a quote that may be""
> in sentence three."
>
> I need to grab the first sentence for further processing (without the
> period, without the beginning quote mark) into a variable, but am having
> difficulty. Can anyone suggest an easy way to do this? I'm open to
> bash,perl,python solutions, but prefer bash.
>
> TIA,
> dan