How to obtain the absolute path of a file via Shell BASH ZSH SH

Question

Question  is there a simple sh bash zsh fish     command to print the absolute path of whichever file I feed it   Usage case  I m in directory  a b and I d like to print the full path to file c on the command-line so that I can easily paste it into another program   a b c  Simple  yet a little program to do this could probably save me 5 or so seconds when it comes to handling long paths  which in the end adds up  So it surprises me that I can t find a standard utility to do this     is there really none   Here s a sample implementation  abspath py      usr bin python   Author  Diggory Hardy  lt diggory hardy gmail com gt    Licence  public domain   Purpose  print the absolute path of all input paths  import sys import os path if len sys argv  gt 1      for i in range 1 len sys argv            print os path abspath  sys argv i        sys exit 0  else      print  gt  gt  sys stderr   Usage    sys argv 0    PATH       sys exit 1

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This is not an answer to the question  but for those who does scripting   echo  cd   1  2 gt  dev null amp  amp pwd   cd    dirname   1    pwd sed  s         1            it handles         etc correctly  I also seems to work on OSX

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I have placed the following script on my system  amp  I call it as a bash alias for when I want to quickly grab the full path to a file in the current dir      bin bash  usr bin find   PWD  -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -name   1    I am not sure why  but  on OS X when called by a script   PWD  expands to the absolute path  When the find command is called on the command line  it doesn t  But it does what I want    enjoy

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bin sh echo    cd    dirname   1     pwd -P    basename   1

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The top answers in this question may be misleading in some cases  Imagine that the file  whose absolute path you want to find  is in the  PATH variable    node is in  PATH variable type -P node    home user  asdf shims node cd  tmp touch node readlink -e node    tmp node readlink -m node    tmp node readlink -f node    tmp node echo  quot   cd  quot   dirname  quot node quot   quot   pwd -P    basename  quot node quot   quot     tmp node realpath node    tmp node realpath -e node    tmp node    Now let s say that for some reason node does not exist in current directory rm node readlink -e node    lt nothing printed gt  readlink -m node        tmp node           Note   tmp node does not exist  but is printed readlink -f node    tmp node           Note   tmp node does not exist  but is printed echo  quot   cd  quot   dirname  quot node quot   quot   pwd -P    basename  quot node quot   quot     tmp node           Note   tmp node does not exist  but is printed realpath node    tmp node           Note   tmp node does not exist  but is printed realpath -e node   realpath  node  No such file or directory  Based on the above I can conclude that  realpath -e and readlink -e can be used for finding the absolute path of a file  that we expect to exist in current directory  without result being affected by the  PATH variable  The only difference is that realpath outputs to stderr  but both will return error code if file is not found  cd  tmp rm node realpath -e node   echo      realpath  node  No such file or directory   1 readlink -e node   echo      1  Now in case you want the absolute path a of a file that exists in  PATH  the following command would be suitable  independently on whether a file with same name exists in current dir  type -P example txt    path to example txt    Or if you want to follow links readlink -e   type -P example txt     originalpath to example txt    If the file you are looking for is an executable  and wrap again through  readlink -e  for following links   which executablefile    opt bin executablefile   And a  fallback to  PATH if missing  example  cd  tmp touch node echo   readlink -e node    type -P node     tmp node rm node echo   readlink -e node    type -P node     home user  asdf shims node

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Forget about readlink and realpath which may or may not be installed on your system   Expanding on dogbane s answer above here it is expressed as a function      bin bash get abs filename          1   relative filename   echo    cd    dirname   1     amp  amp  pwd    basename   1        you can then use it like this   myabsfile   get abs filename        foo bar file txt     How and why does it work   The solution exploits the fact that the Bash built-in pwd command will print the absolute path of the current directory when invoked without arguments   Why do I like this solution    It is portable and doesn t require neither readlink or realpath which often does not exist on a default install of a given Linux Unix distro   What if dir doesn t exist   As given above the function will fail and print on stderr if the directory path given does not exist  This may not be what you want  You can expand the function to handle that situation      bin bash get abs filename          1   relative filename   if   -d    dirname   1       then     echo    cd    dirname   1     amp  amp  pwd    basename   1      fi     Now it will return an empty string if one the parent dirs do not exist   How do you handle trailing      or     in input    Well  it does give an absolute path in that case  but not a minimal one  It will look like    Users bob Documents      If you want to resolve the      you will need to make the script like   get abs filename          1   relative filename   filename  1   parentdir   dirname    filename       if   -d    filename      then       echo    cd    filename    amp  amp  pwd     elif   -d    parentdir      then     echo    cd    parentdir    amp  amp  pwd    basename    filename       fi

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I use the single line  cd   FILENAME      pwd   However  this can only be used when  FILENAME has a leading path of any kind  relative or absolute  that actually exists  If there is no leading path at all  then the answer is simply  PWD  If the leading path does not exist  then the answer may be indeterminate  otherwise and the answer is simply   FILENAME     if the path is absolute  Putting this all together I would suggest using the following function function abspath         argument 1  file pathname  relative or absolute      returns  file pathname  absolute    if    quot  1 quot      quot   1      quot     then   no path at all     echo  quot  PWD quot    elif    quot   1 0 1  quot      quot   quot  -a  quot   1      quot      quot  1 quot     then   strictly absolute path     echo  quot   1     quot    else   relative path  may fail if a needed folder is non-existent      echo  quot   cd   1      pwd  quot    fi    Note also that this only work in bash and compatible shells   I don t believe the substitutions work in the simple shell sh

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bin bash  file      realpath   file  2 gt  dev null    eval realpath   echo  file   sed  s       g     This makes up for the shortcomings of realpath  store it in a shell script fullpath  You can now call     cd  amp  amp  touch a  a  amp  amp  rm A 2 gt  dev null    fullpath  a a   home user a a   fullpath   a  a  home user a a   fullpath A A  No such file or directory

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The answer of Alexander Klimetschek is okay if your script may insist on a bash or bash compatible shell being present  It won t work with a shell that is only POSIX conforming  Also when the final file is a file in root  the output will be   file  which is not technically incorrect  double   are treated like single ones by the system  but it looks strange  Here s a version that works with every POSIX conforming shell  all external tools it is using are also required by the POSIX standard  and it explicitly handles the root-file case     bin sh  abspath           if     -e  quot  1 quot     then         return 1     fi      file  quot  quot      dir  quot  1 quot      if     -d  quot  dir quot     then         file   basename  quot  dir quot           dir   dirname  quot  dir quot       fi      case  quot  dir quot  in                           dir  quot   pwd   dir quot      esac     result   cd  quot  dir quot   amp  amp  pwd       if   -n  quot  file quot     then         case  quot  result quot  in                                    result  quot  result  quot          esac         result  quot  result file quot      fi      printf  quot  s n quot   quot  result quot     abspath  quot  1 quot   Put that into a file and make it executable and you have a CLI tool to quickly get the absolute path of files and directories  Or just copy the function and use it in your own POSIX conforming scripts  It turns relative paths into absolute ones and returns absolute ones as is  Interesting modifications  If you replace the line result   cd  quot  dir quot   amp  amp  pwd  with result   cd  quot  dir quot   amp  amp  pwd -P   then all symbolic links in the path to the final file are resolved as well  If you are not interested into the first modification  you can optimize the absolute case by returning early  abspath           if     -e  quot  1 quot     then         return 1     fi      case  quot  1 quot  in                         printf  quot  s n quot   quot  1 quot              return 0     esac      file  quot  quot      dir  quot  1 quot      if     -d  quot  dir quot     then         file   basename  quot  dir quot           dir   dirname  quot  dir quot       fi      result   cd  quot  dir quot   amp  amp  pwd       if   -n  quot  file quot     then         case  quot  result quot  in                                   result  quot  result  quot          esac         result  quot  result file quot      fi      printf  quot  s n quot   quot  result quot     And since the question will arise  Why printf instead of echo  echo is intended primary to print messages for the user to stdout  A lot of echo behavior that script writers rely on is in fact unspecified  Not even the famous -n is standardized or the usage of  t for tab  The POSIX standard says  A string to be written to standard output  If the first operand is -n  or if any of the operands contain a  character  the results are implementation-defined    - https   pubs opengroup org onlinepubs 9699919799 utilities echo html Thus whenever you want to write something to stdout and it s not for the purpose of printing a message to the user  the recommendation is to use printf as the behavior of printf is exactly defined  My function uses stdout to pass out a result  this is not a message for the user and thus only using printf guarantees perfect portability

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readlink -m FILE  path to FILE   This is better than readlink -e FILE or realpath  because it works even if the file doesn t exist

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An alternative to get the absolute path in Ruby   realpath    ruby -e  require  Pathname   puts Pathname new   1   realpath to s     Works with no arguments  current folder  and relative and absolute file or folder path as agument

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Answer with Homebrew  realpath is the best answer  but if you don t have it installed  you must first run brew install coreutils which will install coreutils with lots of awesome functions  Writing a custom function and exporting it is too much work and risk for error for something like this  here are two lines     brew install coreutils   realpath your-file-name json

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Here s a zsh-only function that I like for its compactness  It uses the    A    expansion modifier      see zshexpn 1    realpath     for f in       do echo   f   A   done

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The dogbane answer with the description what is coming on       bin sh echo    cd    dirname   1     pwd    basename   1      Explanation    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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Use realpath   realpath example txt  home username example txt

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The simplest if you want to use only builtins is probably   find  pwd  -name fileName   Only an extra two words to type  and this will work on all unix systems  as well as OSX

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This relative path to absolute path converter shell function   requires no utilities  just cd and pwd  works for directories and files handles    and   handles spaces in dir or filenames requires that file or directory exists returns nothing if nothing exists at the given path handles absolute paths as input  passes them through essentially    Code   function abspath           generate absolute path from relative path        1       relative filename       return   absolute path     if   -d   1     then           dir          cd   1   pwd      elif   -f   1     then           file         if     1          then             echo   1          elif     1            then             echo    cd    1       pwd    1               else             echo    pwd   1          fi     fi     Sample     assume inside  parent cur abspath file txt          gt   parent cur file txt abspath                   gt   parent cur abspath                   gt   parent abspath    dir file txt   gt   parent dir file txt abspath    dir    dir     gt   parent dir            anything cd can handle abspath doesnotexist      gt                         empty result if file dir does not exist abspath  file txt         gt   file txt              handle absolute path input   Note  This is based on the answers from nolan6000 and bsingh  but fixes the file case   I also understand that the original question was about an existing command line utility  But since this seems to be THE question on stackoverflow for that including shell scripts that want to have minimal dependencies  I put this script solution here  so I can find it later

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For directories dirname gets tripped for     and returns      nolan6000 s function can be modified to fix that   get abs filename          1   relative filename   if   -d    1         then     echo    cd   1      pwd    1         fi

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The find command may help  find  PWD -name ex  find  PWD -name example log   Lists all the files in or below the current directory with names matching the pattern   You can simplify it if you will only get a few results  e g  directory near bottom of tree containing few files   just  find  PWD   I use this on Solaris 10  which doesn t have the other utilities mentioned

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There is generally no such thing as the absolute path to a file  this statement means that there may be more than one in general  hence the use of the definite article the is not appropriate   An absolute path is any path that start from the root     and designates a file without ambiguity independently of the working directory  see for example wikipedia    A relative path is a path  that is to be interpreted starting from another directory  It may be the working directory if it is a relative path being manipulated by an application  though not necessarily   When it is in a symbolic link in a directory  it is generally intended to be relative to that directory  though the user may have other uses in mind    Hence an absolute path is just a path relative to the root directory   A path  absolute or relative  may or may not contain symbolic links  If it does not  it is also somewhat impervious to changes in the linking structure  but this is not necessarily required or even desirable  Some people call canonical path   or canonical file name or resolved path  an absolute path in which all symbolic links have been resolved  i e  have been replaced by a path to whetever they link to  The commands realpath and readlink both look for a canonical path  but only realpath has an option for getting an absolute path without bothering to resolve symbolic links  along with several other options to get various kind of paths  absolute or relative to some directory    This calls for several remarks    symbolic links can only be resolved if whatever they are supposed to link to is already created  which is obviously not always the case  The commands realpath and readlink have options to account for that  a directory on a path can later become a symbolic link  which means that the path is no longer canonical  Hence the concept is time  or environment  dependent  even in the ideal case  when all symbolic links can be resolved  there may still be more than one canonical path to a file  for two reasons    the partition containing the file may have been mounted simultaneously  ro  on several mount points  there may be hard links to the file  meaning essentially the the file exists in several different directories     Hence  even with the much more restrictive definition of canonical path  there may be several canonical paths to a file  This also means that the qualifier canonical is somewhat inadequate since it usually implies a notion of uniqueness   This expands a brief discussion of the topic in an answer to another similar question at Bash  retrieve absolute path given relative  My conclusion is that realpath is better designed and much more flexible than readlink  The only use of readlink that is not covered by realpath is the call without option returning the value of a symbolic link

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Try readlink which will resolve symbolic links   readlink -e  foo bar baz

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Hey guys I know it s an old thread but I am just posting this for reference to anybody else who visited this like me  If i understood the question correctly  I think the locate  filename command  It displays the absolute path of the file supplied  but only if it exists

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If you don t have readlink or realpath utilities than you can use following function which works in bash and zsh  not sure about the rest    abspath      case   1  in    printf   s n    1      printf   s n    PWD  1    esac      This also works for nonexistent files  as does the python function os path abspath    Unfortunately abspath      somefile doesn t get rid of the dots

[bash] How to obtain the absolute path of a file via Shell (BASH/ZSH/SH)?

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