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This tutorial will explain various ways to get the parent directory of a path in Python. A parent directory is a directory above or above a given directory or file. For example, C:\folder\subfolder\myfile.txtthe parent directory of the path is C:\folder\subfolder. Every directory, except the root directory, has a parent directory.

Get the parent directory in Python using pathlibthe module'spath.parent()

path.parent()The method, as the name suggests, returns the parent directory of the path passed as an argument in the form of a string. Therefore, to get the parent directory of a path, we need to pass the path string to the method pathlibof the module path.parent().

path.parent()The following sample code demonstrates how to use to get the parent directory of a path in Python .

from pathlib import Path

path1 = Path(r"C:\folder\subfolder\myfile.txt")
path2 = Path(r"C:\Myfile.txt")
print(path1.parent)
print(path2.parent)

Output:

C:\folder\subfolder
C:\

Get the parent directory in Python using osthe module'spardir()

os.pardirIs a constant string that refers to the parent directory. For Windows and POSIX operating systems, it is '..', and for Mac operating systems, it is '::'.

When we combine os.path.join()the given path with in the method os.pardir, we can get the parent directory of the given directory.

The following example code demonstrates how to use the and methods osof the module to get the parent directory of a path.os.pardirpath.join()

import os.path

path1 = r"C:\folder\subfolder\myfile.txt"
path2 = r"C:\Myfile.txt"

print(os.path.abspath(os.path.join(path1, os.pardir)))
print(os.path.abspath(os.path.join(path2, os.pardir)))

Output:

C:\folder\subfolder
C:\

As mentioned above, if the operating system is Windows or POSIX, we can also get the same result if we os.pardirreplace with .'..'

import os.path

path1 = r"C:\folder\subfolder\myfile.txt"
path2 = r"C:\Myfile.txt"

print(os.path.abspath(os.path.join(path1, "..")))
print(os.path.abspath(os.path.join(path2, "..")))

Output:

C:\folder\subfolder
C:\

Get the parent directory in Python using osthe module'sdirname()

osThe module's dirname()method takes a path string as input and returns the parent directory as output.

The following sample code demonstrates how to use dirname()the method to get the parent directory of a path.

import os.path

path1 = Path(r"C:\folder\subfolder\myfile.txt")
path2 = Path(r"C:\Myfile.txt")

print(os.path.dirname(path1))
print(os.path.dirname(path2))

Output:

C:\folder\subfolder
C: