redhat man page for basename

DIRNAME(3)						     Linux Programmer's Manual							DIRNAME(3)

NAME
       dirname, basename - Parse pathname components

SYNOPSIS
       #include <libgen.h>

       char *dirname(char *path);
       char *basename(char *path);

DESCRIPTION
       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  '/'.   Trailing
       '/' 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 if you need to preserve the pathname string, copies should be passed to these
       functions.  Furthermore, dirname and basename may return pointers to statically allocated memory which may  be  overwritten  by	subsequent
       calls.

       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"
       "/"	      "/"	     "/"
       "."	      "."	     "."
       ".."	      "."	     ".."

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);
       free(dirc);
       free(basec);

RETURN VALUE
       Both dirname and basename return pointers to null-terminated strings.

BUGS
       In  versions  of glibc up to and including 2.2.1, dirname does not correctly handle pathnames with trailing '/' characters, and generates a
       segmentation violation if given a NULL argument.

CONFORMING TO
       SUSv2

SEE ALSO
       dirname(1), basename(1),

GNU
								    2000-12-14								DIRNAME(3)