Chops the end ends off text files either before or after a marker string. The companion Behead utility chops the beginnings off files before or after a marker string. chop.jar [-q] -charset="UTF-8" -before="xxx" -after="yyy" [-s] files and dirs -q = quiet. Suppress progress messages. -charset= what character set the file is, uses platform default if you leave it out. -before= the string to look for in the file. The tail end of the file is chopped off starting just before this marker. The marker is case-sensitive. -after= the string to look for in the file. The tail end of the file is chopped off starting just after this marker. You must have either -before or -after but not both. The marker is case-sensitive. -s= also process subdirs, then a list of files and directories, multiples but no wildcards supported yet. Neither -before nor -after can be regexes. It is almost impossible to specify a regex on the command line without the command line processor messing it up. For details on possible encodings and how to tell which encoding a file is using, see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/encoding.html behead.jar [-q] -charset="UTF-8" -before="xxx" -after="yyy" [-s] files and dirs -q = quiet. Suppress progress messages. -charset= what character set the file is, uses platform default if you leave it out. -before= the string to look for in the file. The beginning of the file is chopped off starting just before this marker. The marker is case-sensitive. -after= the string to look for in the file. The beginning of the file is chopped off starting just after this marker. You must have either -before or -after but not both. The marker is case-sensitive. -s= also process subdirs, then a list of files and directories, multiples but no wildcards supported yet. What are these utilities for? I wrote them when a bug tacked on junk to my files. I wrote it to strip off the junk. It can be useful is screenscraping to peel footers or headers off the pages you download. For more complicated chopping, try the splitter utility. Why the axe icon? It symbolises chopping the end off a file or beheading.