Converting relative path to absolute path without symbolic link

Question

Is there a Unix command to get the absolute (and canonicalized) path from a relative path which may contain symbolic links?

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, for example those that use GNU coreutils and FreeBSD, 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.

Answer 5

The other answers here were fine but were insufficient for my needs. I needed a solution that I could use in my scripts on any machine. My solution was to write a shell script which I can invoke from the scripts where I need it.

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -eq 0 ] || [ $# -gt 2 ]; then
  printf 'Usage: respath path [working-directory]\n' >&2
  exit 1
fi
cantGoUp=

path=$1
if [ $# -gt 1 ]; then
  cd "$2"
fi
cwd=`pwd -P` #Use -P option to account for directories that are actually symlinks

#Handle non-relative paths, which don't need resolution
if echo "$path" | grep '^/' > /dev/null ; then
  printf '%s\n' "$path"
  exit 0
fi

#Resolve for each occurrence of ".." at the beginning of the given path.
#For performance, don't worry about ".." in the middle of the path.
while true
do
  case "$path" in
    ..*)
      if [ "$cwd" = '/' ]; then
        printf 'Invalid relative path\n' >&2
        exit 1
      fi
      if [ "$path" = '..' ]; then
        path=
      else
        path=`echo "$path" | sed 's;^\.\./;;'`
      fi
      cwd=`dirname $cwd`
      ;;
    *)
      break
      ;;
  esac
done

cwd=`echo "$cwd" | sed 's;/$;;'`
if [ -z "$path" ]; then
  if [ -z "$cwd" ]; then
    cwd='/'
  fi
  printf '%s\n' "$cwd"
else
  printf '%s/%s\n' "$cwd" "$path"
fi

This solution is written for the Bourne Shell for portability. I have this in a script named "respath.sh".

This script can be used like this:

respath.sh '/path/to/file'

Or like this

respath.sh '/relative/path/here' '/path/to/resolve/relative/to'

The script resolves the path in the first argument using the path from the second argument as the starting point. If only the first argument is provided, then the script resolves the path relative to your current working directory.

Answer 6

In case, additionally, you have some predefined path for $1 (usually ${PWD}), the following would work:

CWD="${1:-${PredefinedAbsolutePath}}"
if [ "${CWD}" != "${PredefinedAbsolutePath}}" ]; then
    case $1 in
        /*) echo "CWD=${CWD}"; ;;
        *) CWD=$(realpath $1); echo "CWD=${CWD}"; ;;
    esac
fi

Answer 7

Respecting everyone else answer, I found the function below to be very easier and portable between linux / MAC OSX than others I found everywhere. Might help someone.

#!/usr/bin/bash
get_absolute_path(){
    file_path=`pwd $1`
    echo "$file_path/$1"
}
#to assign to a variable
absolute_path=$(get_absolute_path "file.txt")
echo $absolute_path

Answer 8

Assume variable a stores a path name (a="whatever")

1. For potential space-containing path:

c=$(grep -o " " <<< $a | wc -l); if (( $c > "0" )); then a=$(sed 's/ /\\ /g' <<< $a); fi

2. For the actual question, i.e. converting path to absolute: readlink can retrieve symlink contents, which can be employed as follows. (note readlink -f would have been perfect but is not available in at least Mac OS X bash, in which -f stands for FORMATS.)

if [[ $(readlink $a) == "" ]]; then a=$(cd $a; pwd); else a=$(cd $(readlink $a); pwd); fi

3. Just learned pwd -P in man pwd: -P is to "Display the physical current working directory (all symbolic links resolved)" and hence

if (( $(grep -o " " <<< $a | wc -l) > "0" )); then a=$(sed 's/ /\\ /g' <<< $a); fi; a=$(cd $a; pwd -P)

shall work, too.

Conclusion: combine 1 with 2 to satisfy both of your requirements, while space-containing path names are already taken care of in the more concise 3.