Extract filename and extension in Bash

Question

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\'.\'          


        

Answer 1

Based largely off of @mklement0's excellent, and chock-full of random, useful bashisms - as well as other answers to this / other questions / "that darn internet"... I wrapped it all up in a little, slightly more comprehensible, reusable function for my (or your) .bash_profile that takes care of what (I consider) should be a more robust version of dirname/basename / what have you..

function path { SAVEIFS=$IFS; IFS=""   # stash IFS for safe-keeping, etc.
    [[ $# != 2 ]] && echo "usage: path <path> <dir|name|fullname|ext>" && return    # demand 2 arguments
    [[ $1 =~ ^(.*/)?(.+)?$ ]] && {     # regex parse the path
        dir=${BASH_REMATCH[1]}
        file=${BASH_REMATCH[2]}
        ext=$([[ $file = *.* ]] && printf %s ${file##*.} || printf '')
        # edge cases for extensionless files and files like ".nesh_profile.coffee"
        [[ $file == $ext ]] && fnr=$file && ext='' || fnr=${file:0:$((${#file}-${#ext}))}
        case "$2" in
             dir) echo      "${dir%/*}"; ;;
            name) echo      "${fnr%.*}"; ;;
        fullname) echo "${fnr%.*}.$ext"; ;;
             ext) echo           "$ext"; ;;
        esac
    }
    IFS=$SAVEIFS
}     

Usage examples...

SOMEPATH=/path/to.some/.random\ file.gzip
path $SOMEPATH dir        # /path/to.some
path $SOMEPATH name       # .random file
path $SOMEPATH ext        # gzip
path $SOMEPATH fullname   # .random file.gzip                     
path gobbledygook         # usage: -bash <path> <dir|name|fullname|ext>

Answer 2

A simple answer:

To expand on the POSIX variables answer, note that you can do more interesting patterns. So for the case detailed here, you could simply do this:

tar -zxvf $1
cd ${1%.tar.*}

That will cut off the last occurrence of .tar.<something>.

More generally, if you wanted to remove the last occurrence of .<something>.<something-else> then

${1.*.*}

should work fine.

The link the above answer appears to be dead. Here's a great explanation of a bunch of the string manipulation you can do directly in Bash, from TLDP.

Answer 3

Mellen writes in a comment on a blog post:

Using Bash, there’s also ${file%.*} to get the filename without the extension and ${file##*.} to get the extension alone. That is,

file="thisfile.txt"
echo "filename: ${file%.*}"
echo "extension: ${file##*.}"

Outputs:

filename: thisfile
extension: txt

Answer 4

Magic file recognition

In addition to the lot of good answers on this Stack Overflow question I would like to add:

Under Linux and other unixen, there is a magic command named file, that do filetype detection by analysing some first bytes of file. This is a very old tool, initialy used for print servers (if not created for... I'm not sure about that).

file myfile.txt
myfile.txt: UTF-8 Unicode text

file -b --mime-type myfile.txt
text/plain

Standards extensions could be found in /etc/mime.types (on my Debian GNU/Linux desktop. See man file and man mime.types. Perhaps you have to install the file utility and mime-support packages):

grep $( file -b --mime-type myfile.txt ) </etc/mime.types
text/plain      asc txt text pot brf srt

You could create a bash function for determining right extension. There is a little (not perfect) sample:

file2ext() {
    local _mimetype=$(file -Lb --mime-type "$1") _line _basemimetype
    case ${_mimetype##*[/.-]} in
        gzip | bzip2 | xz | z )
            _mimetype=${_mimetype##*[/.-]}
            _mimetype=${_mimetype//ip}
            _basemimetype=$(file -zLb --mime-type "$1")
            ;;
        stream )
            _mimetype=($(file -Lb "$1"))
            [ "${_mimetype[1]}" = "compressed" ] &&
                _basemimetype=$(file -b --mime-type - < <(
                        ${_mimetype,,} -d <"$1")) ||
                _basemimetype=${_mimetype,,}
            _mimetype=${_mimetype,,}
            ;;
        executable )  _mimetype='' _basemimetype='' ;;
        dosexec )     _mimetype='' _basemimetype='exe' ;;
        shellscript ) _mimetype='' _basemimetype='sh' ;;
        * )
            _basemimetype=$_mimetype
            _mimetype=''
            ;;
    esac
    while read -a _line ;do
        if [ "$_line" == "$_basemimetype" ] ;then
            [ "$_line[1]" ] &&
                _basemimetype=${_line[1]} ||
                _basemimetype=${_basemimetype##*[/.-]}
            break
        fi
        done </etc/mime.types
    case ${_basemimetype##*[/.-]} in
        executable ) _basemimetype='' ;;
        shellscript ) _basemimetype='sh' ;;
        dosexec ) _basemimetype='exe' ;;
        * ) ;;
    esac
    [ "$_mimetype" ] && [ "$_basemimetype" != "$_mimetype" ] &&
      printf ${2+-v} $2 "%s.%s" ${_basemimetype##*[/.-]} ${_mimetype##*[/.-]} ||
      printf ${2+-v} $2 "%s" ${_basemimetype##*[/.-]}
}

This function could set a Bash variable that can be used later:

(This is inspired from @Petesh right answer):

filename=$(basename "$fullfile")
filename="${filename%.*}"
file2ext "$fullfile" extension

echo "$fullfile -> $filename . $extension"

Answer 5

Here are some alternative suggestions (mostly in awk), including some advanced use cases, like extracting version numbers for software packages.

f='/path/to/complex/file.1.0.1.tar.gz'

# Filename : 'file.1.0.x.tar.gz'
    echo "$f" | awk -F'/' '{print $NF}'

# Extension (last): 'gz'
    echo "$f" | awk -F'[.]' '{print $NF}'

# Extension (all) : '1.0.1.tar.gz'
    echo "$f" | awk '{sub(/[^.]*[.]/, "", $0)} 1'

# Extension (last-2): 'tar.gz'
    echo "$f" | awk -F'[.]' '{print $(NF-1)"."$NF}'

# Basename : 'file'
    echo "$f" | awk '{gsub(/.*[/]|[.].*/, "", $0)} 1'

# Basename-extended : 'file.1.0.1.tar'
    echo "$f" | awk '{gsub(/.*[/]|[.]{1}[^.]+$/, "", $0)} 1'

# Path : '/path/to/complex/'
    echo "$f" | awk '{match($0, /.*[/]/, a); print a[0]}'
    # or 
    echo "$f" | grep -Eo '.*[/]'

# Folder (containing the file) : 'complex'
    echo "$f" | awk -F'/' '{$1=""; print $(NF-1)}'

# Version : '1.0.1'
    # Defined as 'number.number' or 'number.number.number'
    echo "$f" | grep -Eo '[0-9]+[.]+[0-9]+[.]?[0-9]?'

    # Version - major : '1'
    echo "$f" | grep -Eo '[0-9]+[.]+[0-9]+[.]?[0-9]?' | cut -d. -f1

    # Version - minor : '0'
    echo "$f" | grep -Eo '[0-9]+[.]+[0-9]+[.]?[0-9]?' | cut -d. -f2

    # Version - patch : '1'
    echo "$f" | grep -Eo '[0-9]+[.]+[0-9]+[.]?[0-9]?' | cut -d. -f3

# All Components : "path to complex file 1 0 1 tar gz"
    echo "$f" | awk -F'[/.]' '{$1=""; print $0}'

# Is absolute : True (exit-code : 0)
    # Return true if it is an absolute path (starting with '/' or '~/'
    echo "$f" | grep -q '^[/]\|^~/'

All use cases are using the original full path as input, without depending on intermediate results.

Answer 6

This is the only one that worked for me:

path='folder/other_folder/file.js'

base=${path##*/}
echo ${base%.*}

>> file

This can also be used in string interpolation as well, but unfortunately you have to set base beforehand.