Get last field using awk substr

Question

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/filena

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

Another option is to use bash parameter substitution.

$ foo="/home/parent/child/filename"
$ echo ${foo##*/}
filename
$ foo="/home/parent/child/child2/filename"
$ echo ${foo##*/}
filename