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Full Discussion: Custom directory path variable
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Custom directory path variable Post 302461071 by rwuerth on Friday 8th of October 2010 11:17:52 AM
Old 10-08-2010
The only option I see is testing the user input to the shell to see what you want to do from there. A case/esac structure might work well in this instance. Perhaps coupled with "dirname"

Something like


Code:
 
USERIN=$1 

case "$(dirname $USERIN)" in
  /) echo fully qualified;;
  .) echo relative to current directory;;
  ..) echo relative to parent directory;;
  ../..) echo relative to parent/parent directory;;
...  # < --- replace this
esac

You need to replace the ellipses with one test for each level it can go beyond the script's parent/parent directory back to root.

Obviously you replace the echo statements with code that actually works for you.

dirname seems to know that if you give the name "somewhere" or the name "./somewhere" it will translate that to a single dot "." so that reduces the amount of
tests by one.

And of course after I post that, I realize there's still a host of things that wont work correctly, depending upon input like (../somewhere/else) but maybe this will get you started somewhat? :-)
Last edited by rwuerth; 10-08-2010 at 12:23 PM..
 

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LEARN ABOUT OSX

dirname

DIRNAME(3)						   BSD Library Functions Manual 						DIRNAME(3)

NAME

     dirname -- extract the directory part of a pathname

SYNOPSIS

     #include <libgen.h>

     char *
     dirname(char *path);

DESCRIPTION

     The dirname() function is the converse of basename(3); it returns a pointer to the parent directory of the pathname pointed to by path.  Any
     trailing '/' characters are not counted as part of the directory name.  If path is a null pointer, the empty string, or contains no '/' char-
     acters, dirname() returns a pointer to the string ".", signifying the current directory.

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES

     The dirname() function returns a pointer to internal storage space allocated on the first call that will be overwritten by subsequent calls.

     Other vendor implementations of dirname() may modify the contents of the string passed to dirname(); if portability is desired, this should
     be taken into account when writing code which calls this function.

LEGACY SYNOPSIS

     #include <libgen.h>

     char *
     dirname(const char *path);

     In legacy mode, path will not be changed.

RETURN VALUES

     On successful completion, dirname() returns a pointer to the parent directory of path.

     If dirname() fails, a null pointer is returned and the global variable errno is set to indicate the error.

ERRORS

     The following error codes may be set in errno:

     [ENAMETOOLONG]	The path component to be returned was larger than MAXPATHLEN.

SEE ALSO

     basename(1), dirname(1), basename(3), compat(5)

STANDARDS

     The dirname() function conforms to X/Open Portability Guide Issue 4, Version 2 (``XPG4.2'').

HISTORY

     The dirname() function first appeared in OpenBSD 2.2 and FreeBSD 4.2.

AUTHORS

     Todd C. Miller

BSD
								 October 12, 2006							       BSD
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