Getting the parent of a directory in Bash

Question

If I have a file path such as...

/home/smith/Desktop/Test
/home/smith/Desktop/Test/

How do I change the string so it will be the parent dir

Answer 1

Depending on whether you need absolute paths you may want to take an extra step:

child='/home/smith/Desktop/Test/'
parent=$(dirname "$child")
abs_parent=$(realpath "$parent")