Extract the last directory of a pwd output

Question

How do I extract the last directory of a pwd output? I don't want to use any knowledge of how many levels there are in the directory structure. If I wanted to use that, I could do something like:

> pwd
/home/kiki/dev/my_project
> pwd | cut -d'/' -f5
my_project

But I want to use a command that works regardless of where I am in the directory structure. I assume there is a simple command to do this using awk or sed.

Answer 1

Are you looking for basename or dirname?

Something like

basename `pwd`

should be what you want to know.

If you insist on using sed, you could also use

pwd | sed 's#.*/##'

Answer 2

If you want to do it completely within a bash script without running any external binaries, ${PWD##*/} should work.

Answer 3

Using awk:

pwd | awk -F/ '{print $NF}'