Question

I have a path as a string in a shell-script, could be absolute or relative:

/usr/userName/config.cfg

or

../config.cfg

I want to extract the file name (part after the last /, so in this case: ‘config.cfg’)

I figure the best way to do this is with some simple regex? Is this correct? Should or should I use sed or awk instead?

Shell-scripting’s string manipulation features seem pretty primative by themselves, and appear very esoteric.

Any example solutions are also appreciated.

Answer 1

Instead of string manipulation I’d just use

file=`basename '$filename'` 

Edit:

Thanks to unwind for some newer syntax for this (which assumes your filename is held in $filename):

file=$(basename $filename)