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up vote 2 down vote favorite

I have an http link : 

http://www.test.com/abc/def/efg/file.jar

and I want to save the last part file.jar to variable, so the output string is "file.jar".

Condition: link can has different length e.g.:

http://www.test.com/abc/def/file.jar.

I tried it that way: 

awk -F'/' '{print $7}'

, but problem is the length of URL, so I need a command which can be used for any URL length.

share|improve this question
up vote 5 down vote accepted

Using awk for this would work, but it's kind of deer hunting with a howitzer. If you already have your URL bare, it's pretty simple to do what you want if you put it into a shell variable and use bash's built-in parameter substitution:

$ myurl='http://www.example.com/long/path/to/example/file.ext'
$ echo ${myurl##*/}
file.ext

The way this works is by removing a prefix that greedily matches '*/', which is what the ## operator does:

${haystack##needle} # removes any matching 'needle' from the
                    # beginning of the variable 'haystack'
share|improve this answer
    
Any sort of explanation to go with that? – Questionmark 3 hours ago
    
Sure. Will that do? – DopeGhoti 3 hours ago
    
That is great :) – Questionmark 3 hours ago
    
Thank you !!! That is exactly what I was looking for :) – FunTomas 3 hours ago
up vote 3 down vote

With awk, you can use $NF, to get the last field, regardless of number of fields:

awk -F / '{print $NF}'

If you store that string in shell variable, you can use:

a=http://www.test.com/abc/def/efg/file.jar
printf '%s\n' "${a##*/}"
share|improve this answer
up vote 2 down vote

basename and dirname work good for URLs too:

> url="http://www.test.com/abc/def/efg/file.jar"
> basename "$url"; basename -s .jar "$url"; dirname "$url"
file.jar
file
http://www.test.com/abc/def/efg
share|improve this answer

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