[MAN] basename

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BASENAME

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: January 2018
Index Return to Main Contents

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NAME

basename - strip directory and suffix from filenames  

SYNOPSIS

basename ,NAME /[,SUFFIX/]
basename ,OPTION/... ,NAME/...  

DESCRIPTION

Print NAME with any leading directory components removed. If specified, also remove a trailing SUFFIX.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

-a, --multiple

support multiple arguments and treat each as a NAME

-s, --suffix=,SUFFIX/

remove a trailing SUFFIX; implies -a

-z, --zero

end each output line with NUL, not newline

--help

display this help and exit

--version

output version information and exit

 

EXAMPLES

basename /usr/bin/sort

-> "sort"

basename include/stdio.h .h

-> "stdio"

basename -s .h include/stdio.h

-> "stdio"

basename -a any/str1 any/str2

-> "str1" followed by "str2"

 

AUTHOR

Written by David MacKenzie.  

REPORTING BUGS

GNU coreutils online help: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
Report basename translation bugs to <http://translationproject.org/team/>  

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  

SEE ALSO

dirname(1), readlink(1)

Full documentation at: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/basename>
or available locally via: info '(coreutils) basename invocation'

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Index

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

EXAMPLES

AUTHOR

REPORTING BUGS

COPYRIGHT

SEE ALSO

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BASENAME

Section: Linux Programmer's Manual (3)
Updated: 2017-09-15
Index Return to Main Contents

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NAME

basename, dirname - parse pathname components  

SYNOPSIS

#include <libgen.h>

char *dirname(char *path);

char *basename(char *path);

 

DESCRIPTION

Warning: there are two different functions basename() - see below.

The functions dirname() and basename() break a null-terminated pathname string into directory and filename components. In the usual case, dirname() returns the string up to, but not including, the final '/', and basename() returns the component following the final '/'. Trailing '/' characters are not counted as part of the pathname.

If path does not contain a slash, dirname() returns the string "." while basename() returns a copy of path. If path is the string "/", then both dirname() and basename() return the string "/". If path is a null pointer or points to an empty string, then both dirname() and basename() return the string ".".

Concatenating the string returned by dirname(), a "/", and the string returned by basename() yields a complete pathname.

Both dirname() and basename() may modify the contents of path, so it may be desirable to pass a copy when calling one of these functions.

These functions may return pointers to statically allocated memory which may be overwritten by subsequent calls. Alternatively, they may return a pointer to some part of path, so that the string referred to by path should not be modified or freed until the pointer returned by the function is no longer required.

The following list of examples (taken from SUSv2) shows the strings returned by dirname() and basename() for different paths:

path	dirname	basename
/usr/lib	/usr	lib
/usr/	/	usr
usr	.	usr
/	/	/
.	.	.
..	.	..

 

RETURN VALUE

Both dirname() and basename() return pointers to null-terminated strings. (Do not pass these pointers to free(3).)  

ATTRIBUTES

For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).

Interface	Attribute	Value
basename(), dirname()	Thread safety	MT-Safe

 

CONFORMING TO

POSIX.1-2001, POSIX.1-2008.  

NOTES

There are two different versions of basename() - the POSIX version described above, and the GNU version, which one gets after

#define _GNU_SOURCE /* See feature_test_macros(7) */ #include <string.h>

The GNU version never modifies its argument, and returns the empty string when path has a trailing slash, and in particular also when it is "/". There is no GNU version of dirname().

With glibc, one gets the POSIX version of basename() when <libgen.h> is included, and the GNU version otherwise.  

BUGS

In the glibc implementation, the POSIX versions of these functions modify the path argument, and segfault when called with a static string such as "/usr/".

Before glibc 2.2.1, the glibc version of dirname() did not correctly handle pathnames with trailing '/' characters, and generated a segfault if given a NULL argument.  

EXAMPLE

The following code snippet demonstrates the use of basename() and dirname(): char *dirc, *basec, *bname, *dname; char *path = "/etc/passwd";

dirc = strdup(path); basec = strdup(path); dname = dirname(dirc); bname = basename(basec); printf("dirname=%s, basename=%s\n", dname, bname);  

SEE ALSO

basename(1), dirname(1)  

COLOPHON

This page is part of release 4.15 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and the latest version of this page, can be found at https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

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Index

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

RETURN VALUE

ATTRIBUTES

CONFORMING TO

NOTES

BUGS

EXAMPLE

SEE ALSO

COLOPHON

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This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 04:45:40 GMT, September 16, 2022