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

In addition, to the answer of Kent, an alternative awk solution is:

awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="/"}{NF--}1'

which has the same sickness as the one presented by Kent. The following, somewhat longer Awk corrects all the flaws:

awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="/"}{gsub("/+","/")}
     {s=$0~/^\//;NF-=$NF?1:2;$0=$0?$0:(s?"/":".")};1' 

The following table shows the difference:

| path       | dirname | awk full | awk short |
|------------+---------+----------+-----------|
| .          | .       | .        |           |
| /          | /       | /        |           |
| foo        | .       | .        |           |
| foo/       | .       | .        | foo       |
| foo/bar    | foo     | foo      | foo       |
| foo/bar/   | foo     | foo      | foo/bar   |
| /foo       | /       | /        |           |
| /foo/      | /       | /        | /foo      |
| /foo/bar   | /foo    | /foo     | /foo      |
| /foo/bar/  | /foo    | /foo     | /foo/bar  |
| /foo///bar | /foo    | /foo     | /foo//    |

note: dirname is the real way to go, unless you have to process masses of them stored in a file.