dirname Function

dirname takes a string containing a filesystem path and removes the last portion from it.

This function works only with the path string and does not access the filesystem itself. It is therefore unable to take into account filesystem features such as symlinks.

If the path is empty then the result is ".", representing the job file directory.

The behavior of this function depends on the host platform. On Windows systems, it uses backslash \ as the path segment separator. On Unix systems, the slash / is used. The result of this function is normalized, so on a Windows system any slashes in the given path will be replaced by backslashes before returning.

Referring directly to filesystem paths in job arguments may cause spurious diffs if the same configuration is applied from multiple systems or on different host operating systems. We recommend using filesystem paths only for transient values, such as the argument to file (where only the contents are then stored).

Examples

> dirname("foo/bar/baz.txt")
foo/bar

Related Functions

• basename returns only the last portion of a filesystem path, discarding the portion that would be returned by dirname.