For it's always a pain to remember bash wizardry by heart, here's a piece of usefull information collected on the web.
From: "Grigoriy Strokin" <grg@philol.msu.ru> Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell Subject: fast basename and dirname functions for BASH/SH Date: Sat, 27 Dec 1997 21:18:40 +0300
Please send your comments to grg@philol.msu.ru
function basename() { local name="${1##*/}" echo "${name%$2}" }
function dirname() { local dir="${1%${1##*/}}" "${dir:=./}" != "/" && dir="${dir%?}" echo "$dir" }
# Two additional functions: # 1) namename prints the basename without extension # 2) ext prints extension of a file, including "." function namename() { local name=${1##*/} local name0="${name%.*}" echo "${name0:-$name}" } function ext() { local name=${1##*/} local name0="${name%.*}" local ext=${name0:+${name#$name0}} echo "${ext:-.}" }