I only just learned that the venerable basename and dirname are no longer necessary, let-alone the horrible string splitting required for teasing apart names from file extensions. Zsh has some awesomely convenient expansion modifiers which do it all! e.g. given the path “/Users/me/Documents/Work.zip”:
$file:t → Work.zip $file:h → /Users/me/Documents $file:r → /Users/me/Documents/Work $file:e → zip
You can also compose these arbitrarily, e.g.:
$file:t:r → Work
A full list of expansion modifiers is in the Zsh Modifiers documentation.
Kudos to Zaiste Programming for clueing me into this.