Get current directory name (without full path) in a Bash script

How would I get just the current working directory name in a bash script, or even better, just a terminal command.

pwd gives the full path of the current working directory, e.g. /opt/local/bin but I only want bin

21 Answers

No need for basename, and especially no need for a subshell running pwd (which adds an extra, and expensive, fork operation); the shell can do this internally using parameter expansion:

result=${PWD##*/} # to assign to a variable result=${result:-/} # to correct for the case where PWD=/ printf '%s\n' "${PWD##*/}" # to print to stdout # ...more robust than echo for unusual names # (consider a directory named -e or -n) printf '%q\n' "${PWD##*/}" # to print to stdout, quoted for use as shell input # ...useful to make hidden characters readable. 

Note that if you're applying this technique in other circumstances (not PWD, but some other variable holding a directory name), you might need to trim any trailing slashes. The below uses bash's extglob support to work even with multiple trailing slashes:

dirname=/path/to/somewhere// shopt -s extglob # enable +(...) glob syntax result=${dirname%%+(/)} # trim however many trailing slashes exist result=${result##*/} # remove everything before the last / that still remains result=${result:-/} # correct for dirname=/ case printf '%s\n' "$result" 

Alternatively, without extglob:

dirname="/path/to/somewhere//" result="${dirname%"${dirname##*[!/]}"}" # extglob-free multi-trailing-/ trim result="${result##*/}" # remove everything before the last / result=${result:-/} # correct for dirname=/ case 

Use the basename program. For your case:

% basename "$PWD" bin 

$ echo "${PWD##*/}" 

​​​​​

Use:

basename "$PWD" 

OR

IFS=/ var=($PWD) echo ${var[-1]} 

Turn the Internal Filename Separator (IFS) back to space.

IFS= 

There is one space after the IFS.

You can use a combination of pwd and basename. E.g.

#!/bin/bash CURRENT=`pwd` BASENAME=`basename "$CURRENT"` echo "$BASENAME" exit; 

How about grep:

pwd | grep -o '[^/]*$' 

basename $(pwd) 

or

echo "$(basename $(pwd))" 

This thread is great! Here is one more flavor:

pwd | awk -F / '{print $NF}' 

I like the selected answer (Charles Duffy), but be careful if you are in a symlinked dir and you want the name of the target dir. Unfortunately I don't think it can be done in a single parameter expansion expression, perhaps I'm mistaken. This should work:

target_PWD=$(readlink -f .) echo ${target_PWD##*/} 

To see this, an experiment:

cd foo ln -s . bar echo ${PWD##*/} 

reports "bar"

DIRNAME

To show the leading directories of a path (without incurring a fork-exec of /usr/bin/dirname):

echo ${target_PWD%/*} 

This will e.g. transform foo/bar/baz -> foo/bar

echo "$PWD" | sed 's!.*/!!' 

If you are using Bourne shell or ${PWD##*/} is not available.

Surprisingly, no one mentioned this alternative that uses only built-in bash commands:

i="$IFS";IFS='/';set -f;p=($PWD);set +f;IFS="$i";echo "${p[-1]}" 

As an added bonus you can easily obtain the name of the parent directory with:

[ "${#p[@]}" -gt 1 ] && echo "${p[-2]}" 

These will work on Bash 4.3-alpha or newer.

There are a lots way of doing that I particularly liked Charles way because it avoid a new process, but before know this I solved it with awk

pwd | awk -F/ '{print $NF}' 

For the find jockeys out there like me:

find $PWD -maxdepth 0 -printf "%f\n" 

i usually use this in sh scripts

SCRIPTSRC=`readlink -f "$0" || echo "$0"` RUN_PATH=`dirname "${SCRIPTSRC}" || echo .` echo "Running from ${RUN_PATH}" ... cd ${RUN_PATH}/subfolder 

you can use this to automate things ...

Just use:

pwd | xargs basename 

or

basename "`pwd`" 

Below grep with regex is also working,

>pwd | grep -o "\w*-*$" 

If you want to see only the current directory in the bash prompt region, you can edit .bashrc file in ~. Change \w to \W in the line:

PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ ' 

Run source ~/.bashrc and it will only display the directory name in the prompt region.

Ref:

I strongly prefer using gbasename, which is part of GNU coreutils.

You can use the basename utility which deletes any prefix ending in / and the suffix (if present in string) from string, and prints the result on the standard output.

$basename <path-of-directory> 

The following commands will result in printing your current working directory in a bash script.

pushd . CURRENT_DIR="`cd $1; pwd`" popd echo $CURRENT_DIR 

Just remove any character until a / (or \, if you're on Windows). As the match is gonna be made greedy it will remove everything until the last /:

pwd | sed 's/.*\///g' 

In your case the result is as expected:

λ a='/opt/local/bin' λ echo $a | sed 's/.*\///g' bin