Basename
Shell command for extracting the last name from a path
basename is a shell command for extracting the last name of a file path.
The command was introduced in X/Open Portability Guidelines issue 2 of 1987. It was inherited into the first version of POSIX and the Single Unix Specification. It first appeared in 4.4BSD. The version in GNU Core Utilities was written by David MacKenzie. The command is available for Windows as part of the GnuWin32 project and UnxUtils and is in IBM i.
01Use
The Single UNIX Specification is: basename path [suffix]. The required argument, path, is a file path string. The second argument, which is optional, is text to remove from the end of the last name if it ends with the text.
02Examples
The command reports the last part of a path ignoring any trailing slashes.
$ basename /path/to/filename.ext filename.ext $ basename /path/to/ toIf the suffix argument is included and matches the end of the last name, then that text is removed from the result.
$ basename /path/to/filename.ext .ext filename $ basename /path/to/filename.ext xx filename.extSources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Basename”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Fathomly is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Spotted a problem? Tell us.
