This part is really cryptic, I would prefer $ function remove_longest_matching_prefix () { echo "${1##$2}"; } $ remove_longest_matching_prefix "$i" '*/

This part is really cryptic, I would prefer $ function remove_longest_matching_prefix () { echo "${1##$2}"; } $ remove_longest_matching_prefix "$i" '*/' track1.mp3 awk -F/ accepts stream as in perl example