There are also two commands, "dirname" and "basename", you might want to know about. Both are fed a pathname, "pathname" chops off everything up to the last "/" (thus leaving the filename without a path) and "dirname" doing exactly the opposite - it chops off the last "/" and everything following it:
I hope this helps.
bakunin
Last edited by bakunin; 07-31-2012 at 02:49 PM..
Reason: typos corrected
Hi Folks,
In a Unix (ksh) script, is there a way to determine the current working directory path of another logged-in user? Of course, I can use "pwd" to find my own path. But, how do I find it for another active user?
Thanks for any input you can provide. LY (6 Replies)
Hello All, I am trying to list only directories in my current directory using the command "ls -d". But the output only contains the default directory "." and doesn't list the rest of the directories in the working directory. Can anyone explain why this is happening (2 Replies)
Hello,
I am having problem in setting current working directory from shell.
I want to set pwd as an environmental variable in a script. I am following an existing script which is defined as
HOME=$(shell dirname `pwd`)
C_HOME=$(shell echo $(HOME) | sed -e 's:\/:\\\/:g' )
But when I am trying... (3 Replies)
How to change current working directory for dbx on UNIX?
means I'll run pgm from one directory , but getcwd() should return path which I want to be, which is not d current dir
:) (5 Replies)
Hi All
I was wondering what is the most efficient way to find files in the current directory(that may contain 100,000's files), that meets a certain specified file type and of a certain age.
I have experimented with the find command in unix but it also searches all sub directories. I have... (2 Replies)
Can someone tell me how do i set my current working directory in my prompt?
Note: I dont want to use env variable PWD and using `pwd` gives me only my home directoy. suggest a different way ?
I use /bin/sh
thanks!! (3 Replies)
Hi,
I want that the prompt that is being displayed (i.e $ sign) should display always the current directory I am working in instead of that $ sign
example:
as we use PS1=patric and the prompt changes from $ to patric OR
if we write the command PS1=`pwd` it will display the current... (5 Replies)
If I enter (simplified):
find . -printf "%p\n"
then all files in the output are prepended by a "." like
./local/share/test23.log
How can achieve that
a.) the leading "./" is omitted
and/or
b.) the full path to the current directory is inserted (enclosed by brackets and a blank)... (1 Reply)
HPUX does not recognise \h,\w,\u to display the hostname,working directory and username respectively.
So how do i set the PS1 variable to display my current working Directory as my prompt?
I also tried PS1=$PWD,
But it keeps showing the same directory path as prompt which PWD was holding at... (3 Replies)
Hi, I'm very new to Unix, but have been given a command to type in which is :
mail -s <email subject goes here> <my email address> <success.txt
this command is quite a basic one and sends an email containing the contents of the file "success.txt" to whatever email I put in with the subject of... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: rnmuk
2 Replies
LEARN ABOUT LINUX
basename
BASENAME(3) Linux Programmer's Manual BASENAME(3)NAME
basename, dirname - parse pathname components
SYNOPSIS
#include <libgen.h>
char *dirname(char *path);
char *basename(char *path);
DESCRIPTION
Warning: there are two different functions basename() - see below.
The functions dirname() and basename() break a null-terminated pathname string into directory and filename components. In the usual case,
dirname() returns the string up to, but not including, the final '/', and basename() returns the component following the final '/'. Trail-
ing '/' characters are not counted as part of the pathname.
If path does not contain a slash, dirname() returns the string "." while basename() returns a copy of path. If path is the string "/",
then both dirname() and basename() return the string "/". If path is a NULL pointer or points to an empty string, then both dirname() and
basename() return the string ".".
Concatenating the string returned by dirname(), a "/", and the string returned by basename() yields a complete pathname.
Both dirname() and basename() may modify the contents of path, so it may be desirable to pass a copy when calling one of these functions.
These functions may return pointers to statically allocated memory which may be overwritten by subsequent calls. Alternatively, they may
return a pointer to some part of path, so that the string referred to by path should not be modified or freed until the pointer returned by
the function is no longer required.
The following list of examples (taken from SUSv2) shows the strings returned by dirname() and basename() for different paths:
path dirname basename
"/usr/lib" "/usr" "lib"
"/usr/" "/" "usr"
"usr" "." "usr"
"/" "/" "/"
"." "." "."
".." "." ".."
RETURN VALUE
Both dirname() and basename() return pointers to null-terminated strings. (Do not pass these pointers to free(3).)
CONFORMING TO
POSIX.1-2001.
NOTES
There are two different versions of basename() - the POSIX version described above, and the GNU version, which one gets after
#define _GNU_SOURCE
#include <string.h>
The GNU version never modifies its argument, and returns the empty string when path has a trailing slash, and in particular also when it is
"/". There is no GNU version of dirname().
With glibc, one gets the POSIX version of basename() when <libgen.h> is included, and the GNU version otherwise.
BUGS
In the glibc implementation of the POSIX versions of these functions they modify their argument, and segfault when called with a static
string like "/usr/". Before glibc 2.2.1, the glibc version of dirname() did not correctly handle pathnames with trailing '/' characters,
and generated a segfault if given a NULL argument.
EXAMPLE
char *dirc, *basec, *bname, *dname;
char *path = "/etc/passwd";
dirc = strdup(path);
basec = strdup(path);
dname = dirname(dirc);
bname = basename(basec);
printf("dirname=%s, basename=%s
", dname, bname);
SEE ALSO basename(1), dirname(1), feature_test_macros(7)COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.27 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
GNU 2009-03-30 BASENAME(3)