I have obtained a bunch of files for a program as follows:
/work/xiaofenglu/science/myten.*.dump.gz
Now, I need to extract the string myten.* for the base name of sequential output files.
I use the following command to process this problem:
for inputfile in *.dump.gz
do
base_name='basename ${inputfile} .dump.gz'
done
However, it did not work.
Use parameter expansions:
#!/bin/bash
shopt -s nullglob
for f in /work/xiaofenglu/science/myten.*.dump.gz; do
base_name=${f%.dump.gz} # removes trailing .dump.gz
base_name=${base_name##*/} # removes everything up to last / found
printf 'Base name is: %s\n' "$base_name"
done
Your command doesn't work since you're not even calling the command basename. You're just defining the string base_name as the verbatim string
basename ${inputfile} .dump.gz
because of the single quotes. Maybe you saw somewhere this command:
base_name=`basename ${inputfile} .dump.gz`
and you confused the backticks ` with the single quote '. With backticks instead of single quotes, the command works. But it's much better to use, instead of backticks, the $(...) construct:
base_name=$(basename "$inputfile" .dump.gz)
which is called a Command Substitution.
But I would say it's useless to call the external process basename to perform something that Bash can do very well on its own.
:).