/bin/sh Can one Easily Strip Path Name from $0?

Martin McCormick martin at dc.cis.okstate.edu
Wed Nov 14 07:08:58 PST 2007


	I am ashamed to admit that I have been writing shell
scripts for about 15 years but this problem has me stumped. $0
is the shell variable which contains the script name or at least
what name is linked to the script. The string in $0 may or may
not contain a path, depending upon how the script was called. It
is easy to strip off the path if it is always there

#! /bin/sh
PROGNAME=`echo $0 |awk 'BEGIN{FS="/"}{print $NF}'`
echo $PROGNAME

That beautifully isolates the script name but if you happen to
call the script without prepending a path name such as when the
script is in the execution path, you get an error because there
are no slashes in the string so awk gets confused.

	Is there a better way to always end up with only the script name and
nothing else no matter whether the path was prepended or not?

	Thank you.

Martin McCormick


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