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Dealing with paths or pathnames is a common Bash Shell scripting task. dirname and basename are unix programs that are very handy for dealing with pathnames.
Getting current path with pwd (print working directory).
root@cinhtau:/var/log/apache2# pwd
/var/log/apache2
Get last directory
root@cinhtau:/var/log/apache2# basename $(pwd)
apache2
Get all directories except the last directory
root@cinhtau:/var/log/apache2# dirname $(pwd)
/var/log
If you deal with symbolic links, you can use realpath to get the absolute pathname.
pi@pelion /var/run $ realpath shm
/dev/shm
