See the section on Substring removal in the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide‡:
${string#substring}
Deletes shortest match of
substring
from front of$string
.${string##substring}
Deletes longest match of
substring
from front of$string
.
The substring may include a wildcard *
, matching everything. The expression ${0##/*}
prints the value of $0
unless it starts with a forward slash, in which case it prints nothing.
‡ The guide, as of 3/7/2019, mistakenly claims that the match is of $substring
, as if substring
was the name of a variable. It’s not: substring
is just a pattern.