Converting relative path to absolute path in Bash

[psy_ill]

This is a neat trick which has its uses if you are dealing with softlinks. I needed it just the other day, and it took me a while to figure out how to achieve it. If someone else has a better way to do this, I would be glad to see it, as I find my own solution a bit clumsy.

[zmedico]

readlink -f has a similar function. The canonical path is often as good as any absolute path. The bash builtin "cd" has a -P parameter that would make your code behave like readlink -f.
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Zac

[psy_ill]

Ah, nice. I thought readlink only operated on softlinks.
Still, the trick is useful when you haven't got readlink, for example at the sun systems at my university.

[slycordinator]

An easier way is to just do:

[frenkel]

[Gherald]