Originální popis anglicky: 
dirname, basename - Parse pathname components
Návod, kniha: Linux Programmer's Manual
#include <libgen.h>
 
char *dirname(char *path);
char *basename(char *path);
Warning: there are two different functions 
basename - see below.
The functions 
dirname and 
basename break a null-terminated
  pathname string into directory and filename components. In the usual case,
  
dirname returns the string up to, but not including, the final '/', and
  
basename returns the component following the final '/'. Trailing '/'
  characters are not counted as part of the pathname.
If 
path does not contain a slash, 
dirname returns the string
  "." while 
basename returns a copy of 
path. If
  
path is the string "/", then both 
dirname and
  
basename return the string "/". If 
path is a NULL
  pointer or points to an empty string, then both 
dirname and
  
basename return the string ".".
Concatenating the string returned by 
dirname, a "/", and the
  string returned by 
basename yields a complete pathname.
Both 
dirname and 
basename may modify the contents of 
path,
  so copies should be passed to these functions. Furthermore, 
dirname and
  
basename may return pointers to statically allocated memory which may
  be overwritten by subsequent calls.
The following list of examples (taken from SUSv2) shows the strings returned by
  
dirname and 
basename for different paths:
 
path  		dirname		basename
"/usr/lib"	"/usr"		"lib"
"/usr/"		"/"  		"usr"
"usr"		"."  		"usr"
"/"  		"/"  		"/"
"."  		"."  		"."
".."  		"."  		".."
char *dirc, *basec, *bname, *dname;
char *path = "/etc/passwd";
dirc = strdup(path);
basec = strdup(path);
dname = dirname(dirc);
bname = basename(basec);
printf("dirname=%s, basename=%s\n", dname, bname);
 
Both 
dirname and 
basename return pointers to null-terminated
  strings.
There are two different versions of 
basename - the POSIX version
  described above, and the GNU version one gets after
 
  #define _GNU_SOURCE
 
  #include <string.h>
The GNU version never modifies its argument, and returns the empty string when
  
path has a trailing slash, and in particular also when it is
  "/". There is no GNU version of 
dirname.
With glibc, one gets the POSIX version of 
basename when <libgen.h>
  is included, and the GNU version otherwise.
In the glibc implementation of the POSIX versions of these functions they modify
  their argument, and segfault when called with a static string like
  "/usr/". Before glibc 2.2.1, the glibc version of 
dirname did
  not correctly handle pathnames with trailing '/' characters, and generated a
  segfault if given a NULL argument.
POSIX 1003.1-2001
basename(1), 
dirname(1)