Converting relative path to absolute path

Question

Is there a *nix command to get absolute(and canonicalized) path from relative path(with current path) or symbolic link?

Answer 1

You can use the readlink utility, with the -f option:

-f, --canonicalize

      canonicalize  by  following  every symlink in every component of
      the given name recursively; all  but  the  last  component  must
      exist

Some distributions also come with a realpath(1) utility that basically just calls realpath(3) and does pretty much the same thing.

Answer 2

Portably, the PWD variable is set by the shell to one absolute location of the current directory. Any component of that path may be a symbolic link.

case $f in
  /*) absolute=$f;;
  *) absolute=$PWD/$f;;
esac

If you want to eliminate . and .. as well, change to the directory containing the file and obtain $PWD there:

if [ -d "$f" ]; then f=$f/.; fi
absolute=$(cd "$(dirname -- "$f")"; printf %s. "$PWD")
absolute=${absolute%?}
absolute=$absolute/${f##*/}

There's no portable way to follow symbolic links. If you have a path to a directory, then on most unices $(cd -- "$dir" && pwd -P 2>/dev/null | pwd) provides a path that doesn't use symbolic links, because shells that track symbolic links tend to implement pwd -P (“P” for “physical”).

Some unices provide a utility to print the “physical” path to a file.

• Reasonably recent Linux systems (with GNU coreutils or BusyBox) have readlink -f, as do FreeBSD ≥8.3, NetBSD ≥4.0, and OpenBSD as far back as 2.2.
• FreeBSD ≥4.3 has realpath (it's also present on some Linux systems, and it's in BusyBox).

• If Perl is available, you can use the Cwd module.

  perl -MCwd -e 'print Cwd::realpath($ARGV[0])' path/to/file
  

Answer 3

Is pwd fit for your needs? It gives the absolute path of current directory. Or maybe what you want is realpath().

Answer 4

alister and rss67 in this article introduce most stable, compatible and easiest way. I never seen better way than this before.

RELPATH=./../
cd $RELPATH
ABSPATH=`pwd`

If you want to go back to the original location,

ORGPATH=`pwd`
RELPATH=./../
cd $RELPATH
ABSPATH=`pwd`
cd $ORGPATH

or

RELPATH=./../
cd $RELPATH
ABSPATH=`pwd`
cd -

I wish this helps. This was greatest solution for me.