Hi All,

can you please explain me the meaning of this line--

BackupLocation="/inpass/abc"
Parent=$(expr $BackupLocation : '\(.*\)/.*' \| $BackupLocation)

when i ran this as a command also it did not show me anything so could not get the purpose of this line.

Explain it please.

Here is the ouput under ksh93

Note that dirname outputs the same result

It is an attempt to set the variable Parent. You need to follow it with
echo $Parent
to see anything. Basicly, it strips off a trailing slash followed by some characters. Should the regular expression not match, it just returns the input variable. It will stumble if BackupLocation is set to something like "/abc" which matches the regular expression without returning anything. But that input may not be likely. My preferred solution
Parent=${BackupLocation%/*}
would have the same trouble. A better solution might be:
Parent=$(dirname $BackupLocation)
which should work all the time.

Thanks Guys for all your valuable comments.I got it now.

Thanks
Namish