Is there a way of splitting the existing file path directory in Ansible & using that later in the task?

Question

I am new to Ansible & trying to figure out this thing of splitting up directory path so that I can store the new path in new variable & use it later. I am dropping the draft of my playbook below.

---
- name: new directory path
  hosts: servers
  become: true
  become_user: root
  gather_facts: true
  tasks:
    - name: directory path1
      file:
        path: /home/usr/Desktop/hello/hello1
      register: path1
    
    - name: splitting path
      file:
        path: path1.split('/')
      register: path2

What I want is to extract: /home/usr/Desktop/hello from /home/usr/Desktop/hello/hello1 and store it in a new variable path2 so that I can use path2 later. Please suggest what shall I follow?

Answer 1

You can use dirname filter to get a directory from a path. Below code snippet will set /home/usr/Desktop/hello to dir.

Note, do not add a trailing / to the given path otherwise ansible will consider that the directory and will return the same path.

- set_fact:
    dir: "{{ '/home/usr/Desktop/hello/hello1' | dirname }}"