man, you guys have obviously never been paid by the line of code - let's use the power of timtowtdi to make this even longer:

my $file = "/htdocs/project1/docs/file.html";
my $elif = reverse $file;
my $slash = index($elif,'/');
my $index = length( $file ) - $slash;
$index--;
my $dir = substr($file,0, $index);
print $dir;
[download]

You know it makes sense ;-)

/J\