Question

I want to transform /foo/bar/.. to /foo

Is there a bash command which does this?

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Edit: in my practical case, the directory does exist.

Answer 1

if you’re wanting to chomp part of a filename from the path, ‘dirname’ and ‘basename’ are your friends, and ‘realpath’ is handy too.

dirname /foo/bar/baz  # /foo/bar  basename /foo/bar/baz # baz dirname $( dirname  /foo/bar/baz  )  # /foo  realpath ../foo # ../foo: No such file or directory realpath /tmp/../tmp/../tmp # /tmp 

realpath alternatives

If realpath is not supported by your shell, you can try

readlink -f /path/here/..  

Also

readlink -m /path/there/../../  

Works the same as

realpath -s /path/here/../../ 

in that the path doesn’t need to exist to be normalized.