path-parents

path-parents prints all the parents of each path given, optionally skipping parents up to the length specified by --skip.

Installation

path-parents is written in Rust and so needs a Rust toolchain for installation. See https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install for how to install Rust. When Rust is installed path-parents can be installed with:

# This will not work until the crate is published.
cargo install path-parents

There are no pre-built binaries available, contributions to provide binaries are welcome.

Usage

Basic usage

$ path-parents /usr/bin/less /usr/bin/more
/usr
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/less
/usr
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/more

$ path-parents -s 1 /usr/bin/less /usr/bin/more
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/less
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/more

$ (echo /usr/bin/cat; echo /usr/bin/cut ) | path-parents
/usr
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/cat
/usr
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/cut

# Note that this will not work as you hope, and path-parents doesn't try to
# prevent you doing this because filenames can contain spaces.
$ echo /usr/bin/cat /usr/bin/cut | path-parents
/usr
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/cat
/usr/bin/cat /usr
/usr/bin/cat /usr/bin
/usr/bin/cat /usr/bin/cut

More typical usage

path-parents is mostly useful for expanding a path you're having trouble with for debugging purposes. E.g. if access is denied or the file doesn't exist, you can figure out where the problem is with:

ls -l -d $(path-parents /path/with/problems)

E.g.:

$ ls -l -d $(path-parents /opt/homebrew/Cellar/rustup/*/share/zsh/site-functions/_rustup)
drwxr-xr-x    3 root       wheel     96 10 Dec  2022 /opt/
drwxr-xr-x   33 johntobin  admin   1056 28 Feb 22:00 /opt/homebrew/
drwxrwxr-x  151 johntobin  admin   4832  8 Feb 15:36 /opt/homebrew/Cellar/
drwxr-xr-x@   3 johntobin  admin     96  8 Mar 14:59 /opt/homebrew/Cellar/rustup/
drwxr-xr-x@  14 johntobin  admin    448  8 Mar 14:59 /opt/homebrew/Cellar/rustup/1.28.1/
drwxr-xr-x@   4 johntobin  admin    128  5 Mar 11:33 /opt/homebrew/Cellar/rustup/1.28.1/share/
drwxr-xr-x@   3 johntobin  admin     96  5 Mar 11:33 /opt/homebrew/Cellar/rustup/1.28.1/share/zsh/
drwxr-xr-x@   3 johntobin  admin     96  5 Mar 11:33 /opt/homebrew/Cellar/rustup/1.28.1/share/zsh/site-functions/
-rw-r--r--@   1 johntobin  admin  55464  5 Mar 11:33 /opt/homebrew/Cellar/rustup/1.28.1/share/zsh/site-functions/_rustup

If there permission problems or missing files it will be easy to see where the problem starts.

Licence

Licensed under the Apache 2.0 licence, see the LICENSE file accompanying the software.