Basename

Last updated
basename
Initial releaseJanuary 1979;46 years ago (1979-01)
Written in C
Operating system Unix, Unix-like, IBM i, Plan 9, Inferno
Platform Cross-platform
Type Command
License coreutils: GPLv3+
Plan 9: MIT License

basename is a shell command for extracting the last name of a file path.

Contents

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. [1] It first appeared in 4.4BSD. [2] The version in GNU Core Utilities was written by David MacKenzie. [3] The command is available for Windows as part of the GnuWin32 project [4] and UnxUtils [5] and is in IBM i. [6]

Use

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.

Examples

The command reports the last part of a path ignoring any trailing slashes.

$ basename/path/to/filename.extfilename.ext$ basename/path/to/ to

If 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.extxx filename.ext

See also

References

  1. ↑ basename  – Shell and Utilities Reference, The Single UNIX Specification , Version 5 from The Open Group
  2. ↑ basename(1)  –  FreeBSD General Commands Manual
  3. ↑ basename(1)  –  Linux User Manual – User Commands from Manned.org
  4. ↑ CoreUtils for Windows
  5. ↑ Native Win32 ports of some GNU utilities
  6. ↑ IBM. "IBM System i Version 7.2 Programming Qshell" (PDF). IBM . Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-09-18. Retrieved 2020-09-05.
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