How to get a path to folder where a file is location given a full path to it?

Question

I want to get a path to a file location given a full path to that file in bash:

path="/home/user123/Documents/folder1/file1.txt

Given that full path I want to extract the "/home/user123/Documents/folder1" part. Should I just parse the path and throw away the part after the latest "/" or is there a better way?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23162299/how-to-get-the-last-part-of-dirname-in-bash# — George Vasiliou, Nov 28 '16 at 18:26

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 28 '16 at 19:56

2

The dirname command in Linux will do that for you:

$ dirname /home/user123/Documents/folder1/file1.txt
/home/user123/Documents/folder1

To get the other piece, you can use basename:

$ basename /home/user123/Documents/folder1/file1.txt
file1.txt

answered Nov 28 '16 at 19:56

gilez

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 28 '16 at 20:00

0

An alternative solution using sed:

 echo "$path" | sed 's/\(.*\)\/.*/\1/'

answered Nov 28 '16 at 20:00

Jamil Said

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How to get a path to folder where a file is location given a full path to it?

2 Answers2