how to extract path from file location using shell

Question

how to extract path location from below given string.

/opt/oracle/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/bin/tnslsnr

expected output.

/opt/oracle/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/bin

(or)

/opt/oracle/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/bin/

Solution

Use the shell's suffix removal feature

str=/opt/oracle/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/bin/tnslsnr
path=${str%/*}
echo "$path"

In general, ${parameter%word} removes word from the end of parameter. In our case, we want to remove the final slash and all characters which follow: /*.

The above produces:

/opt/oracle/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/bin

Use dirname

dirname can be used to strip the last component from a path:

$ dirname -- "$str"
/opt/oracle/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/bin