I am trying to use awk to get the name of a file given the absolute path to the file.
For example, when given the input path /home/parent/child/filename I would like to get filename
I have tried:
awk -F "/" '{print $5}' input
which works perfectly.
However, I am hard coding $5 which would be incorrect if my input has the following structure:
/home/parent/child1/child2/filename
So a generic solution requires always taking the last field (which will be the filename).
Is there a simple way to do this with the awk substr function?
Answer
Use the fact that awk splits the lines in fields based on a field separator, that you can define. Hence, defining the field separator to / you can say:
awk -F "/" '{print $NF}' input
as NF refers to the number of fields of the current record, printing $NF means printing the last one.
So given a file like this:
/home/parent/child1/child2/child3/filename
/home/parent/child1/child2/filename
/home/parent/child1/filename
This would be the output:
$ awk -F"/" '{print $NF}' file
filename
filename
filename