Extract the last directory of a pwd output

bash unix pwd
Siou picture Siou · Nov 16, 2009 · Viewed 29.8k times · Source

How do I extract the last directory of a pwd output? I don't want to use any knowledge of how many levels there are in the directory structure. If I wanted to use that, I could do something like:

> pwd
/home/kiki/dev/my_project
> pwd | cut -d'/' -f5
my_project

But I want to use a command that works regardless of where I am in the directory structure. I assume there is a simple command to do this using awk or sed.

Answer

mihi picture mihi · Nov 16, 2009

Are you looking for basename or dirname?

Something like 

basename "`pwd`"

should be what you want to know.

If you insist on using sed, you could also use

pwd | sed 's#.*/##'

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