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Why am I not surprised that the PERL part could be solved with bash in the same space. Why are you so eager to use lang on top of lang, in such simple cases?


Feel free to demonstrate. Take a long path with nasty characters and give me the ending file name. I want "track1.mp3" returned from:

  /podcast/with/nasty'--c h a r$/and/stuff/track1.mp3


If you have that in a variable, which you presumably would if you're reading them one at a time, you can use "remove longest matching prefix" substitution.

    $ i="/podcast/with/nasty'--c h a r$/and/stuff/track1.mp3"
    $ echo "${i##*/}"
    track1.mp3
[Edit: 'thezilch beat me too it by a couple of minutes]


This part is really cryptic, I would prefer

    $ function remove_longest_matching_prefix () { echo "${1##$2}"; }
    $ remove_longest_matching_prefix "$i" '*/'
    track1.mp3
awk -F/ accepts stream as in perl example


You still get +1 for providing a pointer to the explanation while remaining clear and succinct.


$ basename "/podcast/with/nasty'--c h a r$/and/stuff/track1.mp3"

track1.mp3


  $ path="/podcast/with/nasty'--c h a r$/and/stuff/track1.mp3"
  $ echo "${path##*/}"
  track1.mp3
  $ basename "${path}"
  track1.mp3
  $ echo "${path}" | awk -F/ '{print $NF}'
  track1.mp3


In zsh it would be

    echo “${uglypath:t}”




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