You got a lot of good answers. I will copy-paste an idea from shell scripting (reminded to me by pryrt's answer): change-dir to the location and then ask for cwd. It implies that you can find extract the dirname of said path (edit: just for cd'ing to it, so you don't need to resolve it, the system will (try)) and also, (edit: most importantly) have the permissions to change-dir to that. Edit: Also, these paths must be real so to changedir to them. Edit: so perhaps not very practical in some use-cases. I use this to find the containing dir of a shell script in bash. But as I said, caveats exist. Oh! and it will be super slow compared to any programmatic way.

1 min edit: If you chdir to a symlink dir, some systems' cwd will report the symlinked dir instead of resolving it, so ...

bw, bliako