Search code examples
bashunixpwd

Extract the last directory of a pwd output


How do I extract the last directory of a pwd output? I don't want to use any knowledge of how many levels there are in the directory structure. If I wanted to use that, I could do something like:

> pwd
/home/kiki/dev/my_project
> pwd | cut -d'/' -f5
my_project

But I want to use a command that works regardless of where I am in the directory structure. I assume there is a simple command to do this using awk or sed.


Solution

  • Are you looking for basename or dirname?

    Something like

    basename "`pwd`"
    

    should be what you want to know.

    If you insist on using sed, you could also use

    pwd | sed 's#.*/##'