Basename

basename is a shell command for extracting the last name of a file path.

basename

Initial release	January 1979; 46 years ago (1979-01)
Written in	C
Operating system	Unix, Unix-like, Plan 9, Inferno
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Command
License	coreutils: GPLv3+ Plan 9: MIT License

The command was introduced in X/Open Portability Guidelines issue 2 of 1987. It was inherited into the first version of POSIX and the Single Unix Specification.^[1] It first appeared in 4.4BSD.^[2] The version in GNU Core Utilities was written by David MacKenzie.^[3] The command is available for Windows as part of the GnuWin32 project^[4] and UnxUtils.^[5]

Use

The Single UNIX Specification is: basename path [suffix]. The required argument, path, is a file path string. The second argument, which is optional, is text to remove from the end of the last name if it ends with the text.

Examples

The command reports the last part of a path ignoring any trailing slashes.

$ basename /home/jsmith/base.wiki 
base.wiki

$ basename /home/jsmith/
jsmith

If the suffix argument is included and matches the end of the last name, then that text is removed from the result.

$ basename /home/jsmith/base.wiki .wiki
base

$ basename /home/jsmith/base.wiki xx
base.wiki

See also

• dirname – Shell command in Unix systems
• List of POSIX commands