[Leaplist] command line question ....

[Andrew]

On Feb 14, 2009, at 5:50 PM, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:

> .... is there a way intrinsic to tcsh, bash, or perhaps using awk,  
> to 'mask' off the 1st n (or last n for that matter) elements of a  
> long pathname (i.e. go from '/some/darn/long/idiot/moron/path' to  
> either '/some/darn/long' or /long/idiot/moron/path', for example) ?  
> I have RTFM a fair amount & it is eluding me .... TIA ....

Something like this may be what you're after:

#!/bin/bash

INPUT=/some/very/long/path/name/with/a/file
# strip off the first 4 path elements of INPUT
STRIP=4

OUTPUT=${INPUT}

for idx in `seq 0 ${STRIP}`
do
          OUTPUT=${OUTPUT:`expr index ${OUTPUT} '/'`}
done

echo /${OUTPUT} # /name/with/a/file

Of course, don't forget about the 'dirname' command as well.  A few  
loops over a path with dirname may also fit your needs.

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