Timeline for How to obtain the absolute path of a file via Shell (BASH/ZSH/SH)?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
20 events
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| Mar 3, 2023 at 20:59 | comment | added | jrodman | This is a good efficient solution, and probably works with dash as well as bash, but will fail on bourne. It might be worth mentioning that this expects posix shell pattern expansion, which will be available pretty much anywhere on Linux but may fail on aging commercial unix systems. | |
| Mar 3, 2020 at 11:34 | comment | added | leamas | Really nice solution. One possible drawback: it requires that the path $1 exists, at least the directory parts of it. | |
| Oct 20, 2017 at 20:51 | comment | added | Alexander Klimetschek |
@cxw Thanks, good find. This was only a problem with single-level absolute file paths such as /file.txt, while /dir or /dir/file.txt worked before. I fixed it by incorporating your change.
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| Oct 20, 2017 at 20:48 | history | edited | Alexander Klimetschek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
add support for singel-level absolute paths such as /file.txt
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| Oct 20, 2017 at 15:44 | comment | added | cxw |
Alexander, thanks very much! I edited to if [[ $1 = /* ]] ; then echo "$1" ; elif [[ $1 = */* ... in the file branch so it could also handle absolute paths as input.
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| Jul 18, 2017 at 18:39 | history | edited | Alexander Klimetschek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
improved sample
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| May 23, 2017 at 12:34 | history | edited | URL Rewriter Bot |
replaced http://stackoverflow.com/ with https://stackoverflow.com/
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| Jan 12, 2016 at 23:47 | history | edited | Alexander Klimetschek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
clarified this is a shell function
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| Jul 1, 2015 at 20:27 | comment | added | Bruno Bronosky | I was looking for something like readlink which gives the realpath with the symlink expanded. Upon closer examination, this is not the right question for that. | |
| Jul 1, 2015 at 19:28 | comment | added | Alexander Klimetschek | @BrunoBronosky it works fine for me with symlinks. Do you have an example that does not work? Note that it will return the absolute path (in case of symlinks based on the symlink you pass in), not the "canonical" path, which I would consider having a separate tool/function for that is likely much more difficult to implement in a simple shell function. | |
| Jul 1, 2015 at 12:39 | comment | added | Bruno Bronosky | This is a well thought out answer, but it doesn't work for symbolic links to files, only to directories. So, if you have a script that looks for a config file in the same directory as the script, you can't symlink the script to ~/bin. This is a pretty common practice for tools that are under version control. | |
| Mar 27, 2015 at 1:37 | comment | added | Alexander Klimetschek |
@Six True, updated. The braces ( ... ) are still needed, so the cd happens in a subshell, as we don't want to change the working directory for any callers of abspath.
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| Mar 27, 2015 at 1:35 | history | edited | Alexander Klimetschek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
small improvement: don't call echo where it's not needed
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| Mar 26, 2015 at 14:07 | comment | added | Six |
I looked through dozens of half-cocked solutions and this definitely appears to be the most concise and accurate bash-only solution. You could slim it even more by replacing echo "$(cd "$1"; pwd)" with (cd "$1"; pwd). There is no need for echo here.
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| Dec 27, 2014 at 7:17 | history | edited | Alexander Klimetschek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
fix to support spaces in directory names (arguments to cd were not properly quoted)
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| Dec 24, 2014 at 11:52 | comment | added | george |
This doesn't work for directories with spaces, i.e.: $ abspath 'a b c/file.txt' That's because the argument to cd isn't quoted. To overcome this, instead of quoting the entire argument to echo (is there a reason for these quotes?) quote only the path arguments. I.e. replace echo "$(cd ${1%/*}; pwd)/${1##*/}" with echo $(cd "${1%/*}"; pwd)/${1##*/}.
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| Apr 11, 2014 at 7:42 | history | edited | Alexander Klimetschek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
question clarifications
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| Apr 11, 2014 at 7:36 | history | edited | Alexander Klimetschek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
proper credits
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| Apr 11, 2014 at 2:20 | history | edited | Alexander Klimetschek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
fixed code when relative path is just a filename
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| Apr 11, 2014 at 2:12 | history | answered | Alexander Klimetschek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |