How do I take a directory name from a given dir?

[Fredrik Lundh]

"Merrigan" wrote:

> I am trying to write a script to backup all my company's server configs
> weekly. The script will run in a cronjob, on whatever I set it.
>
> The issue I am currently having isto "extract" the directory name from
> a given directory string. For example: from the string
> "/home/testuser/projects/" I need to extract the "projects" part. The
> problem is that the directory names that needs to be used will never be
> the same lenght, so as far as my (very limited) knowledge stretches,
> slicing and indicing is out of the question.

os.path.split(path) splits a path into directory name and "base name"
parts.

    >>> import os
    >>> os.path.split("/usr/bin/python")
    ('/usr/bin', 'python')

if you have a trailing slash, split will return an empty string for the base-
name part

    >>> os.path.split("/home/testuser/projects/")
    ('/home/testuser/projects', '')

but you can work around that by doing an extra split:

    >>> path = "/home/testuser/projects/"
    >>> path, name = os.path.split(path)
    >>> if not name:
    ...     path, name = os.path.split(path)
    ...
    >>> path
    '/home/testuser'
    >>> name
    'projects'

hope this helps!

</F>