Get the name of the folder from a path with whitespace

Question

I'm new to bash and I'd like to know how to print the last folder name from a path.

mypath="/Users/ckull/Desktop/Winchester stuff/a b c/some other folder/"
dir="$(basename $mypath)"
echo "looking in $dir"

Where dir is the last directory in the path. It should print as

some other folder

Instead I get:

Winchester
stuff
a
b
c
some
other
folder

I understand that spaces are causing problems ;) Do I need to pipe the result to a string and then replace newlines? Or perhaps a better way...

Answer 1

When dealing with whitespaces, all variables should be double-quoted when passed as command line arguments, so bash would know to treat them as a single parameter:

mypath="/Users/ckull/Desktop/Winchester stuff/a b c/some other folder/"
dir="$(basename "$mypath")" # quote also around $mypath!
echo "lookig in $dir"
# examples
ls "$dir" # quote only around $dir!
cp "$dir/a.txt" "$dir/b.txt"

This is how variable expansion occurs in bash:

var="aaa bbb"
               # args: 0      1              2     3
foo $var ccc   # ==>   "foo"  "aaa"          "bbb" "ccc"
foo "$var" ccc # ==>   "foo"  "aaa bbb"      "ccc"
foo "$var ccc" # ==>   "foo"  "aaa bbb ccc"