Delete everything before last / in bash

Question

I have many file paths in a file that look like so:

/home/rtz11/files/testfiles/547/prob547455_01

I want to use a bash script that will pri

Answer 1

Using sed for this is vast overkill -- bash has extensive string manipulation built in, and using this built-in support is far more efficient when operating on only a single line.

s=/home/rtz11/files/testfiles/547/prob547455_01
basename="${s##*/}"
echo "$basename"

This will remove everything from the beginning of the string greedily matching */. See the bash-hackers wiki entry for parameter expansion.

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If you only want to remove everything prior to the last /, but not including it (a literal reading of your question, but also a generally less useful operation), you might instead want if [[ $s = */* ]]; then echo "/${s##*/}"; else echo "$s"; fi.