Hey all I am trying to chop the last part of a URL off regardless of it's size and I can't seem to figure it out. Below is an example of what I am trying to do.

If I pass in...

http://mydomain.com/files/scott/test/

I want to get out...

http://mydomain.com/files/scott/

i have tried the following and it's not working

location="http://mydomain.com/files/scott/test/"

echo $location | cut -d / -f 1-$((NF-1))

That does not work.

Does anybody have a quick one liner to do this?

This (kind of) works ...

You can use dirname but it will lose the trailing /

Or you can use sed like so

And this

1 members found this post helpful.

Ah, regular expressions, so powerful yet so potentially unreadable


For the benefit of anyone who's eyes are popping at the examples above, most examples of sed use / for the delimiter but you can use a different character instead. pixellany has stuck with / and escaped the instances of / in the pattern being matched. I went with ! so as not to have to escape the instances of / in the pattern and Tinkster has used @, presumably for the same reason.

Thank you everybody for you suggestions. With a combination of what I read on this thread plus a suggestion i co-worker made i have come up with this.

echo "http://foo.bar.com/test/test2" | sed -r 's@(.*)/[^/]+/*$@\1/@'

I still don't fully understand how this regex is working. I do know however that the @ signs are replacing the /'s that you would normally use in sed. I also know that ^ stand for beginning of line and $ stands for end of line and \1 is the text to replace with and the slash after the 1 is to put the trailing slash back on.

Can somebody give me a brief description as to how the rest of this works?

Thanks again,
Scott

Just a more verbose (possible slower and in retrospect less elegant) version
of what the other guys did.

You match the string excluding the last chunk, be it alpha or terminated
with a /, and replace the whole thing with the matched bit at the front.
The parenthesis are the capturing bit.

"^" means beginning of line---unless of course it means negation....

"[^/]+" = " at least one character that is NOT a forward slash (Extended Regex rules)

"[^\/]*" = " any number of characters that is NOT a forward slash (Standard Regex rules when "/" is the sed s delimiter)

I just realized 2 reasons why Tink's version is better than mine:
Mine will match two "/" at the end of the line
Mine will NOT match--eg--.../stuff (ie it fails if the final / is missing