dirname

(PHP 4, PHP 5)

dirnameReturns parent directory's path

Description

string dirname ( string $path )

Given a string containing the path of a file or directory, this function will return the parent directory's path.

Parameters

path

A path.

On Windows, both slash (/) and backslash (\) are used as directory separator character. In other environments, it is the forward slash (/).

Return Values

Returns the path of the parent directory. If there are no slashes in path, a dot ('.') is returned, indicating the current directory. Otherwise, the returned string is path with any trailing /component removed.

Changelog

Version Description
5.0.0 dirname() is now binary safe
4.0.3 dirname() was fixed to be POSIX-compliant.

Examples

Example #1 dirname() example

<?php
echo "1) ".dirname("/etc/passwd").PHP_EOL;
echo 
"2) ".dirname("/etc/").PHP_EOL;
echo 
"3) ".dirname(".");
?>

The above example will output:

1) /etc
2) /
3) .

Notes

Note:

dirname() operates naively on the input string, and is not aware of the actual filesystem, or path components such as "..".

Note:

dirname() is locale aware, so for it to see the correct directory name with multibyte character paths, the matching locale must be set using the setlocale() function.

Note:

Since PHP 4.3.0, you will often get a slash or a dot back from dirname() in situations where the older functionality would have given you the empty string.

Check the following change example:

<?php

//before PHP 4.3.0
dirname('c:/'); // returned '.'

//after PHP 4.3.0
dirname('c:/x'); // returns 'c:\'
dirname('c:/Temp/x'); // returns 'c:/Temp'
dirname('/x'); // returns '\'

?>

See Also

  • basename() - Returns trailing name component of path
  • pathinfo() - Returns information about a file path
  • realpath() - Returns canonicalized absolute pathname


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