Remove a character from the end of a variable

Bash auto completion appends a / at the end of a directory name. How I can strip this off from a positional parameter?

#!/bin/sh

target=$1

function backup(){
  date=`date "+%y%m%d_%H%M%S"`
  PWD=`pwd`
  path=$PWD/$target
  tar czf /tmp/$date$target.tar.gz $path
}

backup

Solution 1:

Use

target=${1%/}

A reference.

Solution 2:

Use target=${1%/}

See this the parameter substitution of this bash scripting guide for more.