Having trouble extracting absolute directory from type command
 

I need to extract the absolute directory from the type command when I pass it a program name. E.g.
There is one other case (I believe):
I thought of using regex, but it returns the whole line, not just the match. In addition, there is no option cited in the man page for type that returns just the command directory. I appreciate your help!

Note: this is part of my solution to a programming assignment in bash shell scripting.

Not sure what you are using to do the regex matching, but a command such as grep has a flag ('-o') to return only a match.

The bash regex matches also have ways of accessing the matches - have a look at the elements of BASH_REMATCH.