Bash string variable manipulation

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

In a bash script I've set a variable that is the directory name of where an executable lives.

the_dir=`dirname $which myscript`

which equates to something like "/path/to/dir/bin"

I need to cut that down to remove the "bin" so I now have "/path/to/dir/".

This sounds easy but as a complete novice I'm getting lost.
How do I do it and more importantly what is the best tool for this job so I can do a lot of reading?

Thanks.

2 
a=/path/to/dir/bin
echo ${a%/*}

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3

Hi,

Indeed it is easy (after spending hours and hours and hours ...)
You can use string manipulation to achieve your objective via:

new_dir=${the_dir%/bin*}

Essentially, it matches /bin and anything after that hence the * and returns the left of the string that was not matched.

A.