dirname

dirname [OPTION] NAME...

Strip last component from file name

Options

--zero, -z

separate output with NUL rather than newline

Output each NAME with its last non-slash component and trailing slashes removed; if NAME contains no /'s, output '.' (meaning the current directory).

Examples

Calculate the parent directory of a given path:

dirname {{path/to/file_or_directory}}

Calculate the parent directory of multiple paths:

dirname {{path/to/file_or_directory1 path/to/file_or_directory2 ...}}

Delimit output with a NUL character instead of a newline (useful when combining with xargs):

dirname --zero {{path/to/file_or_directory1 path/to/file_or_directory2 ...}}

The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project under the CC BY 4.0 License.

Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail.