Going to the parent directory of a file with cd?

I am writing a .sh to do some work for me, but I am now at the point where I have to cd to the directory the file /path/to/file.end is in. terminal doesn't allow

cd /path/to/file.end
bash: cd: /path/to/file.end: Not a directory

there is sadly no workaround I know of, so it would be nice if you could help!

2

3 Answers

Type cd $( dirname /path/to/file.end). That will take you into /path/to.

Explanation:

• dirname returns the complete path for a file (without the filename, which you would get with basename) - i.e. dirname /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99update-notifier returns /etc/apt/apt.conf.d
• the expression $(anything) is replaced by the result of the command in the parentheses. So cd $( dirname /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/99update-notifier) is executed as cd /etc/apt/apt.conf.d

Another (but old and discouraged) notation for the same was

cd `dirname /path/to/file.end` 

You can not cd into a file. Here is a (command line) function that will automatically cd into a path for a given fully qualified file path:

function fcd () { [ -f "$1" ] && { cd "$(dirname "$1")"; } || { cd "$1"; } ; pwd; }

7

If you append "/.." to the filename that will take you to the correct directory e.g. cd /path/to/. It works on Cygwin anyway.

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