Given a string containing a path to a file, this function will return the name of the directory.
On Windows, both slash (/) and backslash (\) are used as path separator character. In other environments, it is the forward slash (/).
<?php
$path = "/etc/passwd";
$file = dirname ($path); // $file is set to "/etc"
?>In PHP 4.0.3, dirname() was fixed to be POSIX-compliant. Essentially, this means that 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. Note that this means that 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.
See also basename(), pathinfo(), and realpath().
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