I need the following sed one-liner periodically, and I thought it was useful enough to share here. Other versions I’ve seen chopped off everything after the first dot, which doesn’t work for files with a dot in the basename. This one does:

sed s/\.[^\.]*$//

Sample Usage:

bsterne@zodiac:~$ ls /video | sed s/\.[^\.]*$// | head -n5
2001: A Space Odyssey
40 Year Old Virgin, The
9
A Bronx Tale
A Clockwork Orange