By the way, you wrote “remove the last 5 lines from a text file”, but your example indicates removal of the last 5 characters from each line, so I assume the latter was correct.

@Mark-Olson

Ah, yes — my bad, and thanks much for the correction.

For @drghty , just to make sure you understand why Mark’s correction is potentially important, depending on the total content of your text file, my FIND pattern .{5}$ would also match up to five consecutive newline sequences, if your file has multiple consecutive newlines, if it does not include (?-s), or you don’t have . matches newline disabled.

Hi everyone,
I would like to get Notepad++ to remove the last 5 lines from a text file I have.

Make sure caret is at start of file, or at or before first line you want to be affected, or enable Wrap around
Search Mode = Regular expression

FIND: .{5}$
REPLACE: [empty]

.{5} matches any five characters
$ matches the end of the line