How to get the last part of dirname in Bash

Question

Suppose I have a file /from/here/to/there.txt, and want to get only the last part of its dirname to instead of /from/here/to, what should I do?

Answer 1

You can use basename even though it's not a file. Strip off the file name using dirname, then use basename to get the last element of the string:

dir="/from/here/to/there.txt"
dir="$(dirname $dir)"   # Returns "/from/hear/to"
dir="$(basename $dir)"  # Returns just "to"

Answer 2

Using bash string functions:

$ s="/from/here/to/there.txt"
$ s="${s%/*}" && echo "${s##*/}"
to

Answer 3

The opposite of dirname is basename:

basename "$(dirname "/from/here/to/there.txt")"

Answer 4

Pure BASH way:

s="/from/here/to/there.txt"
[[ "$s" =~ ([^/]+)/[^/]+$ ]] && echo "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
to

Answer 5

Using Bash parameter expansion, you could do this:

path="/from/here/to/there.txt"
dir="${path%/*}"       # sets dir      to '/from/here/to' (equivalent of dirname)
last_dir="${dir##*/}"  # sets last_dir to 'to' (equivalent of basename)

This is more efficient since no external commands are used.

Answer 6

One more way

IFS=/ read -ra x <<<"/from/here/to/there.txt" && printf "%s\n" "${x[-2]}"

Answer 7

An awk way of doing it would be:

awk -F'/' '{print $(NF-1)}' <<< "/from/here/to/there.txt"

Explanation:

• -F'/' sets field separator as "/"
• print the second last field $(NF-1)
• <<< uses anything after it as standard input (wiki explanation)

Answer 8

This question is something like THIS.

For solving that you can do:

DirPath="/from/here/to/there.txt"
DirPath="$(dirname $DirPath)"
DirPath="$(basename $DirPath)"

echo "$DirPath"

As my friend said this is possible as well:

basename `dirname "/from/here/to/there.txt"`

In order to get any part of your path you could do:

echo "/from/here/to/there.txt" | awk -F/ '{ print $2 }'
OR
echo "/from/here/to/there.txt" | awk -F/ '{ print $3 }'
OR
etc