Often you may want to extract a filename without the extension from a path in Bash.
There are two common ways to do so:
Method 1: Extract Filename Without Extension when Extension is Known
basename $my_path .txt
This particular example returns the filename without the extension from the path specified by the $my_path variable when it is known that the file has a .txt extension.
Method 2: Extract Filename Without Extension when Extension is Unknown
echo "$(x=${my_path##*/}; echo ${x%.*})"
This particular example returns the filename without the extension from the path specified by the $my_path variable when the extension of the file is unknown.
The following examples show how to use each method in practice.
Example 1: Extract Filename Without Extension when Extension is Known
Suppose that we have a file named teams.txt with the following file path:
- c:/users/bobbi/teams.txt
Suppose that we would like to extract only the filename without the extension, which would be the following:
- teams
Since we know that the extension is .txt for the file, we can use the following syntax:
my_path='/c/users/bobbi/teams.txt' basename $my_path .txt
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this returns teams, which represents the filename without the extension.
Example 2: Extract Filename Without Extension when Extension is Unknown
Once again, suppose that we have a file named teams.txt with the following file path:
- c:/users/bobbi/teams.txt
Again suppose that we would like to extract only the filename without the extension, which would be the following:
- teams
Suppose that we don’t know the extension of this particular file.
We can use the following syntax to extract the filename without the extension:
my_path='/c/users/bobbi/teams.txt'
echo "$(x=${my_path##*/}; echo ${x%.*})"
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this returns teams, which represents the filename without the extension.
Note: The x used in the code is simply a placeholder. Feel free to replace the character x with any other character that you would like.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Bash:
Bash: Count Number of Lines in Each File in Directory
Bash: How to Count Number of Folders in a Directory
Bash: How to Add Prefix to All Files in Directory
Bash: How to Add Prefix to All Files in Directory
