Extract filename and extension in Bash

Question

I want to get the filename (without extension) and the extension separately.

The best solution I found so far is:

NAME=`echo "$FILE" | cut -d'.' -f1`
EXTENSION=`echo "$FILE" | cut -d'.' -f2`

This is wrong because it doesn't work if the file name contains multiple . characters. If, let's say, I have a.b.js, it will consider a and b.js, instead of a.b and js.

It can be easily done in Python with

file, ext = os.path.splitext(path)

but I'd prefer not to fire up a Python interpreter just for this, if possible.

Any better ideas?

Answer 1

You could use the cut command to remove the last two extensions (the ".tar.gz" part):

$ echo "foo.tar.gz" | cut -d'.' --complement -f2-
foo

---

As noted by Clayton Hughes in a comment, this will not work for the actual example in the question. So as an alternative I propose using sed with extended regular expressions, like this:

$ echo "mpc-1.0.1.tar.gz" | sed -r 's/\.[[:alnum:]]+\.[[:alnum:]]+$//'
mpc-1.0.1

It works by removing the last two (alpha-numeric) extensions unconditionally.

[Updated again after comment from Anders Lindahl]

Answer 2

Smallest and simplest solution (in single line) is:

$ file=/blaabla/bla/blah/foo.txt
echo $(basename ${file%.*}) # foo

Answer 3

How to extract the filename and extension in fish:

function split-filename-extension --description "Prints the filename and extension"
  for file in $argv
    if test -f $file
      set --local extension (echo $file | awk -F. '{print $NF}')
      set --local filename (basename $file .$extension)
      echo "$filename $extension"
    else
      echo "$file is not a valid file"
    end
  end
end

Caveats: Splits on the last dot, which works well for filenames with dots in them, but not well for extensions with dots in them. See example below.

Usage:

$ split-filename-extension foo-0.4.2.zip bar.tar.gz
foo-0.4.2 zip  # Looks good!
bar.tar gz  # Careful, you probably want .tar.gz as the extension.

There's probably better ways to do this. Feel free to edit my answer to improve it.

---

If there's a limited set of extensions you'll be dealing with and you know all of them, try this:

switch $file
  case *.tar
    echo (basename $file .tar) tar
  case *.tar.bz2
    echo (basename $file .tar.bz2) tar.bz2
  case *.tar.gz
    echo (basename $file .tar.gz) tar.gz
  # and so on
end

This does not have the caveat as the first example, but you do have to handle every case so it could be more tedious depending on how many extensions you can expect.

Answer 4

You can force cut to display all fields and subsequent ones adding - to field number.

NAME=`basename "$FILE"`
EXTENSION=`echo "$NAME" | cut -d'.' -f2-`

So if FILE is eth0.pcap.gz, the EXTENSION will be pcap.gz

Using the same logic, you can also fetch the file name using '-' with cut as follows :

NAME=`basename "$FILE" | cut -d'.' -f-1`

This works even for filenames that do not have any extension.

Answer 5

Based largely off of @mklement0's excellent, and chock-full of random, useful bashisms - as well as other answers to this / other questions / "that darn internet"... I wrapped it all up in a little, slightly more comprehensible, reusable function for my (or your) .bash_profile that takes care of what (I consider) should be a more robust version of dirname/basename / what have you..

function path { SAVEIFS=$IFS; IFS=""   # stash IFS for safe-keeping, etc.
    [[ $# != 2 ]] && echo "usage: path <path> <dir|name|fullname|ext>" && return    # demand 2 arguments
    [[ $1 =~ ^(.*/)?(.+)?$ ]] && {     # regex parse the path
        dir=${BASH_REMATCH[1]}
        file=${BASH_REMATCH[2]}
        ext=$([[ $file = *.* ]] && printf %s ${file##*.} || printf '')
        # edge cases for extesionless files and files like ".nesh_profile.coffee"
        [[ $file == $ext ]] && fnr=$file && ext='' || fnr=${file:0:$((${#file}-${#ext}))}
        case "$2" in
             dir) echo      "${dir%/*}"; ;;
            name) echo      "${fnr%.*}"; ;;
        fullname) echo "${fnr%.*}.$ext"; ;;
             ext) echo           "$ext"; ;;
        esac
    }
    IFS=$SAVEIFS
}     

Usage examples...

SOMEPATH=/path/to.some/.random\ file.gzip
path $SOMEPATH dir        # /path/to.some
path $SOMEPATH name       # .random file
path $SOMEPATH ext        # gzip
path $SOMEPATH fullname   # .random file.gzip                     
path gobbledygook         # usage: -bash <path> <dir|name|fullname|ext>

Answer 6

Magic file recognition

In addition to the lot of good answers on this Stack Overflow question I would like to add:

Under Linux and other unixen, there is a magic command named file, that do filetype detection by analysing some first bytes of file. This is a very old tool, initialy used for print servers (if not created for... I'm not sure about that).

file myfile.txt
myfile.txt: UTF-8 Unicode text

file -b --mime-type myfile.txt
text/plain

Standards extensions could be found in /etc/mime.types (on my Debian GNU/Linux desktop. See man file and man mime.types. Perhaps you have to install the file utility and mime-support packages):

grep $( file -b --mime-type myfile.txt ) </etc/mime.types
text/plain      asc txt text pot brf srt

You could create a bash function for determining right extension. There is a little (not perfect) sample:

file2ext() {
    local _mimetype=$(file -Lb --mime-type "$1") _line _basemimetype
    case ${_mimetype##*[/.-]} in
        gzip | bzip2 | xz | z )
            _mimetype=${_mimetype##*[/.-]}
            _mimetype=${_mimetype//ip}
            _basemimetype=$(file -zLb --mime-type "$1")
            ;;
        stream )
            _mimetype=($(file -Lb "$1"))
            [ "${_mimetype[1]}" = "compressed" ] &&
                _basemimetype=$(file -b --mime-type - < <(
                        ${_mimetype,,} -d <"$1")) ||
                _basemimetype=${_mimetype,,}
            _mimetype=${_mimetype,,}
            ;;
        executable )  _mimetype='' _basemimetype='' ;;
        dosexec )     _mimetype='' _basemimetype='exe' ;;
        shellscript ) _mimetype='' _basemimetype='sh' ;;
        * )
            _basemimetype=$_mimetype
            _mimetype=''
            ;;
    esac
    while read -a _line ;do
        if [ "$_line" == "$_basemimetype" ] ;then
            [ "$_line[1]" ] &&
                _basemimetype=${_line[1]} ||
                _basemimetype=${_basemimetype##*[/.-]}
            break
        fi
        done </etc/mime.types
    case ${_basemimetype##*[/.-]} in
        executable ) _basemimetype='' ;;
        shellscript ) _basemimetype='sh' ;;
        dosexec ) _basemimetype='exe' ;;
        * ) ;;
    esac
    [ "$_mimetype" ] && [ "$_basemimetype" != "$_mimetype" ] &&
      printf ${2+-v} $2 "%s.%s" ${_basemimetype##*[/.-]} ${_mimetype##*[/.-]} ||
      printf ${2+-v} $2 "%s" ${_basemimetype##*[/.-]}
}

This function could set a Bash variable that can be used later:

(This is inspired from @Petesh right answer):

filename=$(basename "$fullfile")
filename="${filename%.*}"
file2ext "$fullfile" extension

echo "$fullfile -> $filename . $extension"