How to remove last directory from a path with sed?

sed 's,/*[^/]\+/*$,,'

If it's part of the shell script, then dirname will be definitely more clear.

echo "/etc1/etc2/etc3/etc" | sed -e "s/\/[^\/]*$//"

produces

/etc1/etc2/etc3

Basically strip off anything at the end after the last slash that doesn't contain another slash.

you don't have to use external tools

$ a="/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4"

$ echo ${a%/*}

you can use "dirname" shell command:

dirname /dir2/dir3/dir4

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