focusaurus / path-part

Transform filesystem paths from stdin to stdout (better basename & dirname)

path-part: print the interesting part from stdin to stdout

This program was written because the widely distributed classic unix basename and dirname programs expect data input as command line arguments, which composes poorly with unix pipelines and is generally an eyesore in a suite of tools whith mostly a consistent design. After years of working around this with xargs I finally decided to just write them the proper way.

• input comes on standard input. It's newline-separated filesystem paths.
• output goes on standard output. Again newline-separated.
• options are provided as command line arguments.

Usage

path-part {base|extension|extensions|name|path} < my-file-list.txt

path-part expects a single command line argument, which describes the path component you want to keep, discarding implicitly the other parts of the path. It is an enumeration of valid values as follows:

• base Print the final component without any extensions
• extension Print the final period-delimited extension
  • This command is also aliased as ext
• extensions Print all period-delimited filename extensions
  • This command is also aliased as exts
• name Similar to basename. Print only the final path component.
  • This command is also aliased as last and basename
• path Similar to dirname. Strip the final component and print the remainder.
  • This command is also aliased as directory, dir, or `dirname'

Examples

find examples -type f | path-part name
file1.txt
file3.markdown
file2.tar.bz2
file11.yml
file 20.png
file10.yaml
file12.json.crdownload

find examples -type f | ./path-part path
examples
examples
examples
examples/subdir1
examples/subdir1/subdir2
examples/subdir1
examples/subdir1

find examples -type f | ./path-part extensions
txt
markdown
tar.bz2
yml
png
yaml
json.crdownload