Hi guys,

A nice easy one here (for someone who knows at least!). Very simple question - let's say I'm in directory /foo/bar/bin. What are my options to convert a pathname like ".." into /foo/bar? The simpler, and more importantly portable, the better - I'd like to avoid bash-isms if at all possible.

I know there's an easy way to do this, and I think I've even used it myself in the past and forgotten what it is... I tried various invocations of eval and passing arguments into pwd, but to no avail.

Thanks!

FULLPATH=$( cd $ARG; /bin/pwd );

Mmm... that would work on the whole, but it feels a little clunky and awkward. Besides, it doesn't work with symlinks in the way I'd want it to:

Let's further assume that /foo/bar/share is a symlink to /usr/share. Then if we're in directory /foo/bar/bin, I want "../share" to be expanded into "/foo/bar/share". However, CDing into the argument and issuing pwd would return "/usr/share".

The command I had in mind, IIRC, essentially performed variable substitution on the supplied string, such that "~" at the start was transformed into the absolute path of your home directory, etc. I could write something similar myself as a short shell script, but distributing shell scripts isn't an option for me - I need something that'll run in /bin/sh on most *Nixes.

Well, remove /bin/ in pwd: it was intentional because for my last case I needed real absolute path. Just pwd will tell you what shell thinks is absolute path.

Try readlink -f file



Cheers,
Tink