On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 04:36:41PM -0400, Steven W. Orr wrote:
> > foo=/a/b/c/dee.f
> > basename $foo
> dee.f
> > dirname $foo
> /a/b/c
>
> But you're much better off not using any external programs when you have
> the choice of using real builtin stuff.
>
> > echo ${foo##*/} ${foo%/*}
> dee.f /a/b/c
Well, that depends on what you're going for. The built-in solution will be
trivially faster, and will obviously have no external dependencies, but it's
*much* harder to understand at a glance ("basename" and "dirname" are almost
self-documenting). And, while basename and dirname are quite standard unix
and can be pretty much expected to work anywhere, the fancy expansion syntax
you use won't work under /bin/sh on Solaris, say.
--
Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/>
Current office temperature: 79 degrees Fahrenheit.
