In a ksh script I get a file with a path from another program. I need to create the file and it's directories.

I know mkdir -p can make the dirs but how to get the dirs without the filename?

TIA
Keith

Hi:

I think you want to use the dirname command:

filepath=/home/eds/tdir/somefile.txt

dirpath=$(dirname $filepath)
echo $dirpath

Regards,

Nails

Or you could use cut.
get your file/path into some variable

dir=/dir/dir1/dir2/file.txt
echo $dir |cut -f1-4 -d"/"

This will give you
/dir/dir1/dir2/

Thanks nails!
dirname, just what I was looking for.

mibwalker, how do you handle variable length paths?

Like
/dir1/file.txt
vs
/dir1/dir2/.../dir99/file.txt

The cut command does that with the -f (field).
The -d is delimiter. I cut that text string into feilds using / as the delimiter.
If you had a path like /dir1/dir2/dir3/file.txt
cut -f2 -d"/" would give you dir1
cut -f1-2 -d"/" would give you /dir1/
This one is a little tricky because of the / at the very beginning the 1-2 means feild 1 through 2 the first slahs counts as a feild seperator. Just play around with it a little, I use cut for all kinds of things.

An alternative to dirname is ${var%/*}

e.g. if var=/some/filename/with/long/path/x.dat
then
print ${var%/*}
gives
/some/filename/with/long/path

You could script this with
filepath=${var%/*}