How to get base path from path in shell script?

Question

I would need to find a way in Bash (Linux shell in general) to get a base path from a given path. There are a few rules:

• in the given path there will be one directory called ABC.
• the directory ABC contains a subdirectory which I don't know the name of. Below I call it XYZ.

Given this path

/some/absolute/path/foo/ABC/XYZ/bar/path/here

the result should be:

/some/absolute/path/foo/ABC/XYZ

The problem I'm having is due to XYZ, because I don't know it, but need to keep it in the returned path.

Without the unknown XYZ I could do this:

pwd | sed -e 's/ABC.*/ABC/'

Does anyone have a solution how I can solve this in Bash? Thanks!

Answer 1

If you want to do it in pure Bash:

p='/some/absolute/path/foo/ABC/XYZ/bar/path/here'
m=ABC
t=${p##*$m/}          # t=XYZ/bar/path/here
t=${t%%/*}            # t=XYZ
new=${p%$m/*}$m/$t    # new consists of "/some/absolute/path/foo/", "ABC", "/" and "XYZ"

Answer 2

sed -r 's,^(.*/ABC/[^/]+).*,\1,'