Remove current directory from variable containing path

Question

I have a variable which contains the current directory including several parents. For example:

$ pwd
/Users/simont/repositories
$ echo $current
~/repositories

I can strip everything except the current directory from this question:

onlycurrent=${$(current)##*/}

I want to do the opposite: remove the current dir from this variable (so that it only contains ~/). How can I do this?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 25 '13 at 06:55

Using dirname you can strip off the last directory:

$ current="~/repositories"
$ echo $current
~/repositories
$ dirname $current
~

Admittedly this does not save the / character to the right of ~.

If you wish to do this simply using bash you could do:

$ echo ${current%/*}
~

Which strips off everything after the last / (including the / itself).

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 25 '13 at 06:55

This does not solve you problem in full generality, but you may want to look at dirname (and basename)

/home/or..product/oracle10 >pwd
/home/oracle/product/oracle10

/home/or..product/oracle10 >dirname `pwd`
/home/oracle/product

/home/or..product/oracle10 >basename `pwd`
oracle10

BTW: dirname does not really care if the returned string is really a directoy, it works on arbitrary strings.

/home/or..product/oracle10 >dirname "/foo/bar/baz"
/foo/bar

Remove current directory from variable containing path

2 Answers2