Cfrtjryk

I have a list of pathnames like this in a file:

/path/to/directory/one.txt

/longer/path/to/some/directory/two.py

/path/with spaces/in/it/three.sh

I want to delete all characters after the last occurrence of "/",
so the desired output for the above is:

/path/to/directory/

/longer/path/to/some/directory/

/path/with spaces/in/it/

sed 's![^/]*$!!'

This does the following:

• Use a delimiter other than /,
  because the regular expression contains /. 
  (I like ! and | because they look like dividing lines;
  other people use @, #, ^, or whatever they feel like. 
  It is possible to use / in a regular expression delimited by /,
  but that can be hard for a person to read.)


• Find a string of (zero or more) characters other than /. 
  (Make it as long as possible.) 
  But it must be at the end of the line.


• And replace it with nothing.

Caveat: an input line that contains no / characters
will be totally wiped out
(i.e., the entire contents of the line will be deleted,
leaving only a blank line). 
If we wanted to fix that,
and let a line with no slashes pass through unchanged,
we could change the command to

sed 's!/[^/]*$!/!'

This is the same as the first answer,
except it matches the last / and all the characters after it,
and then replaces them with a /
(in effect, leaving the final / in the input line alone). 
So, where the first answer finds one.txt and replaces it with nothing,
this finds /one.txt and replaces it with /. 
But, on a line that contains no / characters,
the first answer matches the entire line and replaces it with nothing,
while this one would not find a match,
and so would not make a substitution.

We could use / as the delimiter in this command,
but then it would have to be

sed 's//[^/]*$///'

“escaping” the slashes that are part of the regular expression
and the replacement string
by preceding them with backslashes (). 
Some people find this jungle of “leaning trees”
to be harder to read and maintain,
but it basically comes down to a matter of style.

You may use the dirname utility:

xargs -I {} dirname {} <file.txt

This would give you the pathnames of each parent directory in the list. For the given list, it would produce

/path/to/directory

/longer/path/to/some/directory

/path/with spaces/in/it

To embed a newline in a path, use

/some/path with a 

newline/in/it

And to embed quotes, escape them as e.g. ".