Grab the filename in Unix out of full path

Question

I am trying to get "abc.txt" out of /this/is/could/be/any/path/abc.txt using Unix command. Note that /this/is/could/be/any/path is dynamic.

Any idea?

Answer 1

In bash:

path=/this/is/could/be/any/path/abc.txt 

If your path has spaces in it, wrap it in "

path="/this/is/could/be/any/path/a b c.txt" 

Then to extract the path, use the basename function

file=$(basename "$path") 

or

file=${path##*/} 

Answer 2

basename path gives the file name at the end of path

Edit:

It is probably worth adding that a common pattern is to use back quotes around commands e.g. `basename ...`, so UNIX shells will execute the command and return its textual value.

So to assign the result of basename to a variable, use

x=`basename ...path...` 

and $x will be the file name.