I am on a Sun Solaris 5.10

Suppose say my pwd command gives me :
/opt/local/sys/data/01/backups

From the above information, would it be possible by any chance to execute a command that can return me just the the directory name(not the whole path) that is {current directory minus one level}

In other words, I am looking for a command that can return me
01

If my present directory was /opt/local/sys/data/20/ksh , gives me
20

Thanks Nick. I tried it out and this is what happens

server01-(/opt/local/sys/data/01/backups)-> pwd | perl -n -e 'split /\//;print $_[@_-2];'

Gives me

01server01-(/opt/local/sys/data/01/backups)->

In other words, I do get 01 but the unix prompt follows right after it and does not get to the new line. Can I make it look like

01
server01-(/opt/local/sys/data/01/backups)->

Well, how about adding a newline to the print statement? The newline looks like "\n".

If you're going to invoke perl, you may as well do it all in Perl:

A somewhat more readable version:

Otherwise, under bash, you could use something like:

Thank you. All of them worked just fine in giving me

01

Even though I am using korn as my default shell and never switch over to anything at any point, the following worked just fine

basename `dirname "$PWD"`

Also keeping in fact, me being a big zero in perl, I would rather play safe and use the basename command.

echo $(cd ..; echo ${PWD##*/})