Extracting File Basename without Extension

Duncan Murdoch wrote:

I'm curious about something: does "file extension" have a standard
definition?  Most (all?  I haven't tried them all) of the solutions
presented in this thread would return an empty string for the "plain
base" if given the filename ".bashrc".

right;  there's a straightforward fix to my solution that accounts for
cases such as '.bashrc':

names = c("foo.bar", ".zee")
sub("(.+)[.][^.]+$", "\\1", names)

you could also use a lookbehind if possible (not in r, afaik).

sub(".*[.]", ".", names)