How do I resolve file paths w/o also resolving symbolic
links (which is what the realpath function does)?

Ehh, when you use realpath() to find the 'resolved path', you are passing it the path you want as it's first argument. So if you are using realpath() you already know the path you are looking for...

(or do I understand you wrong? must be...)

I pass to realpath the relative path name of my symlink
and it returns me the resolved absolute name of the target.

eg.


~/
bar.txt
bar2.txt --> bar2.txt

realpath( "bar2.txt", buf ) (assuming CWD is ~) returns
/home/users/myacc/bar.txt

What I want is to resolve bar2.txt to
/home/users/myacc/bar2.txt

Ah OK,I understand. I didn't think of that.
There would be a problem with such a function. If it exists, that is. I wouldn;t know about any. Sorry.

The problem is that there will always be one, and only one real path, but it's very well possible to have 100 different paths to the same file through several symbolic links. A library function like realpath() only needs to follow all the relative directories (../ ./) and symlinks to find the one and only real path. But to find all possible "un-real" paths such a funtion would need to scan all of the mounted filesystems to search for all symlinks that might lead to your real path, as symlinks are not back-linked. And even then it doesn't know which one of them you would like to know.

So I'm afraid there isn't such a function or any feasible algorythm for that matter to do it. I might be wrong though.

If you are only looking for symlinks to the real file which reside in the same directory, it should be quite possible making your own function which reads all symlinks in the directory where the real file is, and then call realpath() for all of them (probably not too many) and check if which one(s) resolve to the real file.