In a variable containing the path to a file and its name, the file name can be extracted as follows:
#!/bin/bash
filenamepath="/caminho/para/ficheiro.pdf"
filename=$(basename $filenamepath)
What results in ficheiro.pdf in variable filename .
How can we just extract the path to the file?
I think this is enough:
filenamepath="/caminho/para/ficheiro.pdf"
filepath=${filenamepath%/*}
Note: because this is a bash parameter handling, it is not "portable" for any shell .
If you prefer a solution similar to that of the question, using external commands, we have dirname , which is the "natural pair" of basename :
filenamepath="/caminho/para/ficheiro.pdf"
filename=$(dirname $filenamepath)
Alternatively, here is a syntax using sed and demonstrating the use of backticks to get output from another command:
filenamepath="/caminho/para/ficheiro.pdf"
filepath='echo $filenamepath | sed 's|\(.*\)/.*||' '