Manual Pages  — DIRNAME

dirname – extract the directory part of a pathname

SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION IMPLEMENTATION NOTES RETURN VALUES SEE ALSO STANDARDS HISTORY AUTHORS

#include <libgen.h>

char *
dirname(char *path);

This implementation of dirname() uses the buffer provided by the caller to store the resulting parent directory. Other vendor implementations may return a pointer to internal storage space instead. The advantage of the former approach is that it ensures thread-safety, while also placing no upper limit on the supported length of the pathname.

If path is a null pointer, the empty string, or contains no 'amp;/' characters, dirname() returns a pointer to the string "amp;.", signifying the current directory. Otherwise, it returns a pointer to the parent directory of path.

The dirname() function conforms to -xpg4.2.

The dirname() function first appeared in OpenBSD 2.2 and FreeBSD 4.2 .

In FreeBSD 12.0, this function was reimplemented to store its result in the provided input buffer.

Nuxi, the Netherlands