AWK -F with print all but last record

Question

/Home/in/test_file.txt

echo  /Home/in/test_file.txt | awk -F'/' '{ print $2,$3 }'

Gives the result as:

Home in

But I need /Home/in/ as the result .I have to get all except test_file.txt

How to achieve this?

Answer 1

$ echo '/Home/in/test_file.txt' | awk '{sub("/[^/]+$","")} 1'
/Home/in

$ echo '/Home/in/test_file.txt' | awk '{sub("[^/]+$","")} 1'
/Home/in/

$ echo '/Home/in/test_file.txt' | sed 's:/[^/]*$::'
/Home/in

$ echo '/Home/in/test_file.txt' | sed 's:[^/]*$::'
/Home/in/

$ dirname '/Home/in/test_file.txt'
/Home/in

Your attempt awk -F'/' '{ print $2,$3 }' didn't do what you wanted as -F'/' is telling awk to split the input into fields at every / and then print $2,$3 is telling awk to print the 2nd and 3rd fields separated by a blank char (the default value for OFS). You could do:

$ echo '/Home/in/test_file.txt' | awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="/"} { print "",$2,$3,"" }'
/Home/in/

to get the expected output but it'd be the wrong approach since it's removing the field you don't want AND removing the input separators AND then adding new output separators which happen to the have the same value as the input separators rather than simply removing the field you don't want like the other solutions above do.

Answer 2

There are several ways to achieve this:

1. Using dirname:

   $ dirname /home/in/test_file.txt
   /home/in
   

2. Using Shell substitution:

   $ var="/home/in/test_file.txt"
   $ echo "${var%/*}"
   /home/in
   

3. Using sed: (See Ed Morton)

4. Using AWK:

   $ echo "/home/in/test_file.txt" | awk -F'/' '{OFS=FS;$NF=""}1'
   /home/in/
   

Remark: all these work since you can't have a filename with a forward slash (Is it possible to use "/" in a filename?)

Note: all but dirname will fail if you just have a single file_name without a path. While dirname foo will return ./ all others will return foo

Answer 3

echo  /Home/in/test_file.txt | awk -F'/[^/]*$' '{ print $1 }'

..will print the everything but the trailing slash

Answer 4

awk behaves as it should.

When you define slash / as a separator, the fields in your expression become the content between the separators.

If you need the separator to be printed as well, you need to do it explicitly, like:

echo /Home/in/test_file.txt | awk -F'/' '{ printf "%s/%s/",$2,$3 }'

Answer 5

replace your last field with an empty string and
put the slash back in as the (builtin) Output Field Separator (OFS)

echo  /Home/in/test_file.txt | awk -F'/' -vOFS='/' '{$NF="";print}