How to get a file directory path from file path

Question

In Bash  if VAR   home me mydir file c   how do I get   home me mydir

User · Accepted Answer

dirname and basename are the tools you re looking for for extracting path components    export VAR   home pax file c    echo  quot   dirname  quot   VAR  quot   quot    echo  quot   basename  quot   VAR  quot   quot   home pax file c  They re not internal Bash commands but they re part of the POSIX standard -  see dirname and basename  Hence  they re probably available on  or can be obtained for  most platforms that are capable of running bash

User · Answer

HERE   cd   dirname  BASH SOURCE   amp  amp  pwd    where you get the full path with new path   dirname   BASH SOURCE 0     You change current directory with cd new path and then run pwd to get the full path to the current directory

User · Answer

I was playing with this and came up with an alternative     VAR  home me mydir file c    DIR  echo  VAR  xargs dirname     echo  DIR  home me mydir   The part I liked is it was easy to extend backup the tree     DIR  echo  VAR  xargs dirname  xargs dirname  xargs dirname     echo  DIR  home

User · Answer

Here is a script I used for recursive trimming  Replace  1 with the directory you want  of course   BASEDIR   1  IFS    n  cd  BASEDIR  for f in   find   -type f -name        do      DIR   dirname   f       DIR   DIR 1      cd  BASEDIR DIR     rename  s           done

User · Answer

On a related note  if you only have the filename or relative path  dirname on its own won t help  For me  the answer ended up being readlink   fname  txtfile      echo   dirname   fname                    output    echo   readlink -f   fname                output   home me work txtfile   You can then combine the two to get just the directory   echo   dirname   readlink -f   fname      output   home me work

User · Answer

If you care target files to be symbolic link  firstly you can check it and get the original file  The if clause below may help you   if   -h  file   then  base   dirname   readlink  file   else  base   dirname  file  fi

User · Answer

You could try something like this using approach for How to find the last field using  cut   Explanation  rev reverses  home user mydir file name c to be c eman elif ridym resu emoh  cut uses dot  ie    as the delimiter  and chooses the first field  which is c eman elif lastly  we reverse it again to get file name c    VAR  quot  home user mydir file name c quot    echo  VAR   rev   cut -f1 -d quot   quot    rev file name c

User · Answer

export VAR  home me mydir file c   export DIR   VAR       echo    DIR    home me mydir    echo    VAR       file c   To avoid dependency with basename and dirname

[bash] How to get a file directory path from file path?

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