taking the end off a path - Shell Programming and Scripting

Nat · #1 (**permalink**) 06-06-2004

I need a script to be able to take a path such as "/foo/bar/thing" a put the "/foo/bar/" bit in one variable and the "thing" bit in another.

I figured awk would probably be the best tool for the job but looking at the man page didn't seem to help. The only way i know how to use awk is with '{print $1, $2 ,$3}' but that doesn't help unless i can get it to count from the end of the string.

What should i do?

google · #2 (**permalink**) 06-06-2004

use basename to get the file name
and dirname to get the path.

Code:

program=/this/is/the/path/to/my/file.ksh

FILE=$(basename program)
DIR=$(dirname program)

echo $FILE
file.ksh

echo $DIR
/this/is/the/path/to/my

Dont use this code since its better to use built-ins rather than
writing something like this, but, here is a method in Awk to
get the parent directory of a file.


echo $PARENT_PATH | awk ' {
     
              arraySize = split($0, parentPath, "/");
              delete parentPath[arraySize];
    
              for (i in parentPath ) {
               w = w "/" parentPath[i];
  
              }
              print w
            }'

Nat · #3 (**permalink**) 06-06-2004

with a few minor changes it works great

thanks a lot :-)

google · #4 (**permalink**) 06-06-2004

what were the minor changes?

Nat · #5 (**permalink**) 06-06-2004

by minor changes i mean adapting it for my script and changing for example "FILE=$(basename program)" to "FILE=$(basename $program)"

I have also encountered another problem on closer investigation.

$0 which provides the input for dirname and basename does not put a \ before spaces which dirname especially doesn't like.

the only way around this that i can think of is to use something like;

no1=$($0 | awk '{print $1}')
no2=$($0 | awk '{print $2}')
no3=$($0 | awk '{print $3}')

execpath=$(echo $no1\ $no2\ $no3)

exedir=$(dirname $execpath)
exefile=$(filename $execpath)

however this would require me to know how many spaces exactly will be in the files path.

This is starting to look complex.
What do i do?

anarchie · #6 (**permalink**) 06-06-2004

This is where you use quotes most liberally:

exedir=$(dirname "$0")
exefile=$(filename "$0")

google · #7 (**permalink**) 06-06-2004

Can you post some or all of your script? It would be easier to see the script to better trouble shoot it.

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