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Comment by esaym | Hacker News Reader

Feel free to demonstrate. Take a long path with nasty characters and give me the ending file name. I want "track1.mp3" returned from:

  /podcast/with/nasty'--c h a r$/and/stuff/track1.mp3

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If you have that in a variable, which you presumably would if you're reading them one at a time, you can use "remove longest matching prefix" substitution.

    $ i="/podcast/with/nasty'--c h a r$/and/stuff/track1.mp3"
    $ echo "${i##*/}"
    track1.mp3

[Edit: 'thezilch beat me too it by a couple of minutes]

You still get +1 for providing a pointer to the explanation while remaining clear and succinct.

This part is really cryptic, I would prefer

    $ function remove_longest_matching_prefix () { echo "${1##$2}"; }
    $ remove_longest_matching_prefix "$i" '*/'
    track1.mp3

awk -F/ accepts stream as in perl example

$ basename "/podcast/with/nasty'--c h a r$/and/stuff/track1.mp3"

track1.mp3

  $ path="/podcast/with/nasty'--c h a r$/and/stuff/track1.mp3"
  $ echo "${path##*/}"
  track1.mp3
  $ basename "${path}"
  track1.mp3
  $ echo "${path}" | awk -F/ '{print $NF}'
  track1.mp3

In zsh it would be

    echo “${uglypath:t}”

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