I wouldn't say that split and or regexp are the most general ways of attacking this problem. The most general (read: efficient) way would be to find the character with rindex and extract the end of the string with substr. The following does the trick:

This happens to rely on a side-effect of rindex, which is that if the character sought for is not found in the string, -1 is returned. Add 1 (pedant note: length('.') in fact), and instead of stepping over the sought character, it brings -1 up to 0, and hence your substr will hand you back the whole string. This can be construed as a feature :)

But yes, File::Basename is the way to go in this particular case.

update: weird transcription error spotted by sauoq: I had -rindex instead of rindex. Curiously enough, that's exactly what I had when I checked the snippet out on the command line. That'll teach me not to cut and paste...

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