Extracting Directory Names within a Shell Script

Dave's Answer: Initially I thought that this would be a perfect job for dirname, the partner to the better known basename utility. It's not, though, because basename /usr/lib/test is "/usr/lib", not just "/usr". So instead, I'd use cut, a utility I write about in the book too. The cut utility lets you specify the delimiter for field separation and also lets you specify what field you're interested in, so here's what happens when we put all of that together:

$ echo /usr/lib/test | cut -d/ -f2
usr

You can drop that into a pipeline and if we assume that your list of files is itself in a file called "filelist", you're halfway there with this one line:

cut -d/ -f2 filelist

If you want to prepend the slash, you can do that with sed, but let's tackle the "unique" part first with uniq. Since that particular utliity only works if the input is sorted, here's the pipe I have:

cut -d/ -f2 filelist | sort | uniq | sed 's/^/\//'

That'll do everything you want and it's short enough to be an alias!

Hope that helps and good luck with your script writing efforts.