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Is it possible to convert in a shell script a user input path (absolute or relative) to the absolute path but without losing the symlinks inside, e.g. /a/b/c is the current user dir and c is a symlink to /a/b/s:
input . => result /a/b/c
input ./d => result /a/b/c/d
input ../c => result /a/b/c
input /a/b/c => result /a/b/c
(readlink converts it to /a/b/s, but I need /a/b/c)
If I understand your question correctly you need to use realpath with -s:
-s, --strip Only strip . and .., components, but do not resolve symbolic links.
$ realpath -s a/b/c
/tmp/a/b/c
$ readlink a/b/c
s
$PATH.
Mar 5, 2015 at 16:33
realpath -s /a/b/c and realpath -s ../c/d work as expected, but not with one dot at the beginning: realpath -s ./d outputs /a/b/s/d. But this can be fixed in the script. I will test to copy the binary file to the destination server. Hope it will work :-) Thanks again.
..is contradictory: iffis a symlink to/elsewhere, forf/../stuff, do you want/a/b/stuff(eliminating..without looking up symlinks, but you end up with a path that doesn't lead to the same file) or/elsewhere/stuff(which is correct but doesn't go through a symlink) or/a/b/f/../stuff(which is correct but retains..)? The considerations in unix.stackexchange.com/questions/9123/… may be of interest.