How to get parent dir in shell

[Sagar Rohankar]

Hi all,

My PWD is /a/b/c and I want /a/b in shell variable.

Any idea about how to do this.

[Satish Chilukuri]

You can do it with bash parameter substitution:

pwd_str="/a/b/c"
echo ${pwd_str%/*}

You could also use sed:

  echo pwd_str | sed -e s/\\/[^\\/]*$//  

[Sagar Rohankar]

Satish Chilukuri wrote:You can do it with bash parameter substitution:

pwd_str="/a/b/c"
echo ${pwd_str%/*}

Worked Thanks a ton.

[Tim Holloway]

There's also a "dirname" command. You'll see it used in a lot of scripts.

[Sagar Rohankar]

Tim Holloway wrote:There's also a "dirname" command.

Thanks Works, but I think it needs the full path, upto the file name

  echo $(dirname $(dirname /a/b/c/file.txt))  // OP: /a/b

whereas,

  echo $(dirname $(dirname /a/b/c))  // OP: /

[Craig Jackson]

My PWD is /a/b/c and I want /a/b in shell variable.

Another alternative is:

   parentDir=${PWD%/*}  

[Sagar Rohankar]

Craig, I used the same trick ;)