How Linux Works

Important Shell Script Utilities

There are several programs that are particularly useful in shell scripts. Some utilities (such as basename) are really only practical when used in conjunction with other programs, and therefore usually don't find a place outside of shell scripts, but others, such as awk, can be quite useful on the command line too.

basename

If you need to strip the extension off of a filename or get rid of the directories in a full pathname, use the basename command.

Try these examples on the command line to get a feel for how the command works:

basename example.html .html
basename /usr/local/bin/example

In both cases, basename returns example. The first command strips the .html suffix from example.html, and the second removes the ...