Extract filename and extension in Bash

bash string filenames
ibz picture ibz · Jun 8, 2009 · Viewed 1.7M times · Source

I want to get the filename (without extension) and the extension separately.

The best solution I found so far is:

NAME=`echo "$FILE" | cut -d'.' -f1`
EXTENSION=`echo "$FILE" | cut -d'.' -f2`

This is wrong because it doesn't work if the file name contains multiple . characters. If, let's say, I have a.b.js, it will consider a and b.js, instead of a.b and js.

It can be easily done in Python with

file, ext = os.path.splitext(path)

but I'd prefer not to fire up a Python interpreter just for this, if possible.

Any better ideas?

Answer

Petesh picture Petesh · Jun 8, 2009

First, get file name without the path:

filename=$(basename -- "$fullfile")
extension="${filename##*.}"
filename="${filename%.*}"

Alternatively, you can focus on the last '/' of the path instead of the '.' which should work even if you have unpredictable file extensions:

filename="${fullfile##*/}"

You may want to check the documentation :

Related questions

How do I remove the file suffix and path portion from a path string in Bash?

Given a string file path such as /foo/fizzbuzz.bar, how would I use bash to extract just the fizzbuzz portion of said string?

Read More
How to check if a string contains a substring in Bash

I have a string in Bash: string="My string" How can I test if it contains another string? if [ $string ?? 'foo' ]; then echo "It's there!" fi Where ?? is my unknown operator. Do I use echo and grep? if echo "$string" | …

Read More
How to trim whitespace from a Bash variable?

I have a shell script with this code: var=`hg st -R "$path"` if [ -n "$var" ]; then echo $var fi But the conditional code always executes, because hg st always prints at least one newline character. Is there a simple …

Read More