Extract directory from a file path

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Im trying to extract a directory from a path entered by the user

Lets say the path is
path=/home/bliss/files/myfile.txt

i wanna extract "/home/bliss/files" from $path ... how can i do this?

2

echo "/home/bliss/files/myfile.txt" | awk -F"/" '{print $4}'

3

Thanks for the reply dinjo ...

but what if the path is read from the terminal... ie, $path can be anything - like, /home/myfile.txt
/home/bliss/myfile.txt
/home/one/two/myfile.txt
/home/one/two/three/myfile.txt or something else ?

4 
dirname "/home/one/two/three/myfile.txt"

echo "/home/one/two/three/myfile.txt" | sed 's|\(.*\)/.*|\1|'
5

Thanks Panyam ... thats much more flexible !