Bash bad substitution with subshell and substring

Question

A contrived example... given

FOO=\"/foo/bar/baz\"

this works (in bash)

BAR=$(basename $FOO) # result is BAR=\"baz\"
BAZ=${BAR         


        

Answer 1

A contrived solution for your contrived example:

BAZ=$(expr $(basename $FOO) : '\(.\)')

as in

$ FOO=/abc/def/ghi/jkl
$ BAZ=$(expr $(basename $FOO) : '\(.\)')
$ echo $BAZ
j