Extracting directory name from an absolute path using sed or awk

Question

I want to split this line

/home/edwprod/abortive_visit/bin/abortive_proc_call.ksh

to

/home/edwprod/abortive_visit/bin
         


        

Answer 1

This code with awk will work perfectly as same as dirname, I guess.

It's so simple and has very low cost to work. Good luck.

Code

$ foo=/app/java/jdk1.7.0_71/bin/java
$ echo "$foo" | awk -F "/*[^/]*/*$" '
{ print ($1 == "" ? (substr($0, 1, 1) == "/" ? "/" : ".") : $1); }'

Result

/app/java/jdk1.7.0_71/bin

Test

• foo=/app/java/jdk1.7.0_71/bin/java -> /app/java/jdk1.7.0_71/bin
• foo=/app/java/jdk1.7.0_71/bin/ -> /app/java/jdk1.7.0_71
• foo=/app/java/jdk1.7.0_71/bin -> /app/java/jdk1.7.0_71
• foo=/app/ -> /
• foo=/app -> /
• foo=fighters/ -> .

More

If you're not available such awk delimiter, try it this way.

$ echo $foo | awk '{
 dirname = gensub("/*[^/]*/*$", "", "", $0);
 print (dirname == "" ? (substr($0, 1, 1) == "/" ? "/" : ".") : dirname);
 }'