Bash: get current working directory name, but not full path

I know that pwd will print the full path of current working directory, but I want to print only the name of the directory. Is there a simple command to do this without to parse pwd?

1 Answer

Yes, there is. You can use pure bash:

echo "${PWD##*/}"

or better, to avoid the case when you could be in -e directory:

printf '%s\n' "${PWD##*/}"

(thanks to @gniourf_gniourf for the second suggestion).

Or you can use basename tool:

basename "$PWD"