$ x="/home/guru/temp/f1.txt"
$ echo $x | sed 's^.*/^^'

After 231 posts, you must realise that there is some variation in unix/Linux/Shell.
Please post what Operating System and version your are running and what Shell you use.

I would advise all other posters to not respond until the O/P provides proper context.

Post withdrawn...

BSD Sed, OS X 10.6.8 (Mac). Sorry.

This is going to need a sed expert. Anybody out there?

Personally I would use the unix basename command and be sure how it worked. Others may differ.

It takes advantage of the greedy matching characteristic of sed, which means that it will try to find the longest match possible.. So in this case the longest match to .*/ is /home/guru/temp/ , so it will replace that with nothing, since the replacement part contains nothing.

The ^ plays no role, here other than that it is the character that delimits the match part and the replacement part. Normally forward slashes (/) are used for this but it can be almost any character. So instead, one could have used sed 's|.*/||' or s'=.*==' , for example.

--
If your scope is a single variable, than a more effective method is to use basename , as methyl suggests or to use variable expansion:

echo "${x##*/}"

Greedy matching, perfect. Is this characteristic of all Sed versions? How do you determine this regex behavior of a particular command, such as Sed or any other?