How to retrieve absolute path given relative

Question

Is there a command to retrieve the absolute path given the relative path   For example I want  line to contain the absolute path of each file in dir   etc   find    -type f   while read line  do    echo  line done

User · Answer

If you want to transform a variable containing a relative path into an absolute one, this works :

   dir=`cd "$dir"`

"cd" echoes without changing the working directory, because executed here in a sub-shell.

User · Answer

realpath is probably best  But      The initial question was very confused to start with  with an example poorly related to the question as stated   The selected answer actually answers the example given  and not at all the question in the title  The first command is that answer  is it really   I doubt   and could do as well without the      And I fail to see what the second command is doing   Several issues are mixed     changing a relative pathname into an absolute one  whatever it denotes  possibly nothing   Typically  if you issue a command such as touch foo bar  the pathname foo bar must exist for you  and possibly be used in computation  before the file is actually created   there may be several absolute pathname that denote the same file  or potential file   notably because of symbolic links  symlinks  on the path  but possibly for other reasons  a device may be mounted twice as read-only   One may or may not want to resolve explicity such symlinks  getting to the end of a chain of symbolic links to a non-symlink file or name  This may or may not yield an absolute path name  depending on how it is done  And one may  or may not want to resolve it into an absolute pathname    The command readlink foo without option gives an answer only if its argument foo is a symbolic link  and that answer is the value of that symlink  No other link is followed  The answer may be a relative path  whatever was the value of the symlink argument   However  readlink has options  -f -e or -m  that will work for all files  and give one absolute pathname  the one with no symlinks  to the file actually denoted by the argument   This works fine for anything that is not a symlink  though one might desire to use an absolute pathname without resolving the intermediate symlinks on the path  This is done by the command realpath -s foo  In the case of a symlink argument  readlink with its options will again resolve all symlinks on the absolute path to the argument  but that will also include all symlinks that may be encountered by following the argument value  You may not want that if you desired an absolute path to the argument symlink itself  rather than to whatever it may link to   Again  if foo is a symlink  realpath -s foo will get an absolute path without resolving symlinks  including the one given as argument   Without the -s option  realpath does pretty much the same as readlink  except for simply reading the value of a link  as well as several other things   It is just not clear to me why readlink has its options  creating apparently an undesirable redundancy with realpath   Exploring the web does not say much more  except that there may be some variations across systems   Conclusion   realpath is the best command to use  with the most flexibility  at least for the use requested here

User · Answer

An improvement to  ernest-a s rather nice version   absolute path         cd    dirname   1        case   basename  1  in             echo    dirname   pwd                  echo    pwd                 echo    pwd    basename  1         esac     This deals correctly with the case where the last element of the path is     in which case the    pwd    basename   1    in  ernest-a s answer will come through as accurate sub path spurious subdirectory

User · Answer

use  find  quot   pwd  quot   -type f  to get all files or echo  quot   pwd   line quot   to display full path  if relative path matters to

User · Answer

What they said  except find  PWD or  in bash  find    is a bit more convenient

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For what it s worth  I voted for the answer that was picked  but wanted to share a solution  The downside is  it s Linux only - I spent about 5 minutes trying to find the OSX equivalent before coming to Stack overflow  I m sure it s out there though   On Linux you can use readlink -e in tandem with dirname     dirname   readlink -e             etc passwd     yields   etc    And then you use dirname s sister  basename to just get the filename    basename                passwd    yields   passwd   Put it all together    F                etc passwd echo    dirname   readlink -e  F     basename  F     yields   etc passwd   You re safe if you re targeting a directory  basename will return nothing and you ll just end up with double slashes in the final output

User · Answer

You could use bash string substitution for any relative path  line   line   echo   line        cd     pwd      line   echo   line       pwd      echo  line   The basic front-of-string substitution follows the formula   string  substring replacement  which is discussed well here  https   www tldp org LDP abs html string-manipulation html  The   character negates the   when we want it to be part of the string that we find replace

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My favourite solution was the one by  EugenKonkov because it didn t imply the presence of other utilities  the coreutils package    But it failed for the relative paths     and       so here is a slightly improved version handling these special cases   It still fails if the user doesn t have the permission to cd into the parent directory of the relative path  though       bin sh    Takes a path argument and returns it as an absolute path     No-op if the path is already absolute  function to-abs-path       local target   1       if     target            then         echo    pwd       elif     target             then         echo    dirname    pwd         else         echo    cd    dirname   1     pwd    basename   1        fi

User · Answer

Here s a rather short function that can be used to fully absolutize and canonicalize any given input path using only POSIX shell and readlink semantics  canonicalize path                   FILEPATH  quot  1 quot          for   in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8     Maximum symlink recursion depth         do             cd -L  quot  case  quot   FILEPATH  quot  in      echo  quot   FILEPATH     quot       echo  quot   quot    esac   quot     cd   dirname              if   FILEPATH  quot   readlink  quot   FILEPATH      quot       echo  quot   FILEPATH      quot   amp  amp  false     quot               then                 break             fi         done         cd -P  quot   quot     return            echo  quot   pwd    FILEPATH  quot           If the referenced file does not exist only the directory path leading up to the final filename will be resolved  If the any of the directories leading up to the file path does not exist a cd error will be returned  This happens to be the exact semantics of the GNU Linux readlink -f command it tries to mimic  In bash zsh you can also compact the list of numbers to just  1  8  or similar  The number of 8 was chosen as this was maximum limit in Linux for many years before the changed it a total limit of 40 resolution for the entire path in version 4 2  If the resolution limit is reached the code will not fail  but instead return last considered path instead     an explicit    -L   quot   FILEPATH  quot     check could be added to detect this condition however  This code can also be easily reused for ensuring the current working directory matches the executed script s location in the filesystem  a common requirement for shell scripts   by simply removing the function and subshell wrapper  FILEPATH  quot  0 quot  for   in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8     Maximum symlink recursion depth do     cd -L  quot  case  quot   FILEPATH  quot  in      echo  quot   FILEPATH     quot       echo  quot   quot    esac   quot     cd   dirname      if   FILEPATH  quot   readlink  quot   FILEPATH      quot       echo  quot   FILEPATH      quot   amp  amp  false     quot       then         break     fi done cd -P  quot   quot  FILEPATH  quot   pwd    FILEPATH  quot

User · Answer

I was unable to find a solution that was neatly portable between Mac OS Catalina  Ubuntu 16 and Centos 7  so I decided to do it with python inline and it worked well for my bash scripts  to abs path       python -c  quot import os  print os path abspath   1   quot     to abs path  quot  some path    secrets quot

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The best solution  imho  is the one posted here  https   stackoverflow com a 3373298 9724628   It does require python to work  but it seems to cover all or most of the edge cases and be very portable solution    With resolving symlinks    python -c  import os sys  print os path realpath sys argv 1     path to file    or without it    python -c  import os sys  print os path abspath sys argv 1     path to file

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In case of find  it s probably easiest to just give the absolute path for it to search in  e g    find  etc find  pwd  subdir of current dir  -type f

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If you have the coreutils package installed you can generally use readlink -f relative file name in order to retrieve the absolute one  with all symlinks resolved

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echo  mydir doc  mydir usoe   mydir usm     awk    split  0 array       for i in array   system  cd  array i    amp  amp  echo  PWD

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Similar to  ernest-a s answer but without affecting  OLDPWD or define a new function you could fire a subshell  cd  lt path gt   pwd     pwd  etc apache2   cd    cups    cd -  etc apache2    cd       pwd   Users   cd -  etc cups

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If the relative path is a directory path  then try mine  should be the best   absPath   pushd    SOME RELATIVE PATH TO Directory  gt   dev null  amp  amp  pwd  amp  amp  popd  gt   dev null   echo  absPath

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I think this is the most portable   abspath                                                        cd    dirname   1        printf   s  s n     pwd      basename   1        cd   OLDPWD      It will fail if the path does not exist though

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bin sh echo    cd    dirname   1     pwd    basename   1      UPD Some explanations   This script get relative path as argument   1  Then we get dirname part of that path  you can pass either dir or file to this script   dirname   1  Then we cd    dirname   1   into this relative dir and get absolute path for it by running pwd shell command After that we append basename to absolute path    basename   1   As final step we echo it

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This is a chained solution from all others  for example  when realpath fails  either because it is not installed or because it exits with error code  then  the next solution is attempted until it get the path right      bin bash  function getabsolutepath         local target      local changedir      local basedir      local firstattempt       target    1        if     target                then         printf   s     pwd         elif     target                 then         printf   s     dirname    pwd           else         changedir    dirname    target      amp  amp  basedir    basename    target      amp  amp  firstattempt    cd    changedir    amp  amp  pwd    amp  amp  printf   s  s     firstattempt      basedir    amp  amp  return 0          firstattempt    readlink -f    target      amp  amp  printf   s     firstattempt    amp  amp  return 0          firstattempt    realpath    target      amp  amp  printf   s     firstattempt    amp  amp  return 0             If everything fails    TRHOW PYTHON ON IT            local fullpath          local pythoninterpreter          local pythonexecutables          local pythonlocations           pythoninterpreter  python           declare -a pythonlocations    usr bin    bin            declare -a pythonexecutables   python   python2   python3             for path in    pythonlocations               do             for executable in    pythonexecutables                   do                 fullpath    path    executable                     if    -f    fullpath                       then                       printf  Found   fullpath   n                       pythoninterpreter    fullpath                        break                  fi              done               if       pythoninterpreter       python                  then                   printf  Breaking      pythoninterpreter   n                  break              fi          done           firstattempt      pythoninterpreter  -c  import os  sys  print  os path abspath  sys argv 1           target      amp  amp  printf   s     firstattempt    amp  amp  return 0            printf  Error  Could not determine the absolute path   n           return 1      fi    printf    nResults   n s  nExit   s  n     getabsolutepath    asdfasdf  asdfasdf

User · Answer

If you are using bash on Mac OS X which neither has realpath existed nor its readlink can print the absolute path  you may have choice but to code your own version to print it  Here is my implementation    pure bash   abspath      local thePath   if        1           then     thePath   PWD  1    else     thePath   1    fi   echo   thePath      IFS     read -a parr   declare -a outp   for i in    parr      do     case   i  in           continue                  len    outp           if   len  0   then         continue       else         unset outp    len-1           fi                       len    outp           outp  len    i               esac   done   echo     outp             use gawk   abspath gawk         if    -n   1     then         echo  1 gawk                if substr  0 1 1                           path   ENVIRON  PWD      0               else path    0             split path  a                   n   asorti a  b   ind num asc               for i in a                   if a i         a i                             delete a i                                              n   asorti a  b    ind num asc               m   0             while m  n                   m   n                 for i 1 i lt  n i                         if a b i                                   if b i-1  in a                               delete a b i-1                               delete a b i                               n   asorti a  b    ind num asc                               break                           else exit 1                                                                   n   asorti a  b    ind num asc               if n  0                   printf                   else                   for i 1 i lt  n i                         printf    a b i                                                  fi      pure bsd awk      usr bin env awk -f function abspath path     i j n a b back out     if substr path 1 1               path   ENVIRON  PWD     path       split path  a         n   length a    for i 1 i lt  n i         if a i       a i               continue           a   j  a i        for i j 1 i lt  n i         delete a i        j 0   for i length a  i gt  1 i--       if back  0         if a i                  back           continue         else           b   j  a i                else         if a i                  back           continue         else           back--         continue                     if length b   0       return         else       for i length b  i gt  1 i--         out out   b i            return out        BEGIN    if ARGC gt 1       for k 1 k lt ARGC k           print abspath ARGV k             exit           print abspath  0      example     abspath I am        the   god    of        war  Users leon I the war

User · Answer

Eugen s answer didn t quite work for me but this did       absolute    cd   dirname    file     pwd    basename    file       Side note  your current working directory is unaffected

User · Answer

Try realpath        sudo apt-get install realpath    may already be installed     realpath  bashrc  home username  bashrc   To avoid expanding symlinks  use realpath -s   The answer comes from  bash fish command to print absolute path to a file

[bash] How to retrieve absolute path given relative

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