How do you normalize a file path in Bash

Question

I want to transform  foo bar    to  foo  Is there a bash command which does this     Edit  in my practical case  the directory does exist

User · Answer

I discovered today that you can use the stat command to resolve paths.

So for a directory like "~/Documents":

You can run this:

stat -f %N ~/Documents

To get the full path:

/Users/me/Documents

For symlinks, you can use the %Y format option:

stat -f %Y example_symlink

Which might return a result like:

/usr/local/sbin/example_symlink

The formatting options might be different on other versions of *NIX but these worked for me on OSX.

User · Answer

Based on loveborg s excellent python snippet  I wrote this      bin sh    Version of readlink that follows links to the end  good for Mac OS X  for file in       do   while   -h   file     do     l  readlink  file      case   l  in           file   l             file  dirname   file     l      esac   done    echo  file   python -c  import os sys  print os path abspath sys argv 1      file  done

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A simple solution using node js      usr bin env node process stdout write require  path   resolve process argv 2

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Old question  but there is much simpler way if you are dealing with full path names at the shell level      abspath     cd   path     pwd     As the cd happens in a subshell it does not impact the main script   Two variations  supposing your shell built-in commands accept -L and -P  are       abspath     cd -P   path     pwd -P        physical path with resolved symlinks    abspath     cd -L   path     pwd -L        logical path preserving symlinks   Personally  I rarely need this later approach unless I m fascinated with symbolic links for some reason   FYI  variation on obtaining the starting directory of a script which works even if the script changes it s current directory later on   name0    basename   0                       base name of script dir0     cd     dirname   0        pwd      absolute starting dir  The use of CD assures you always have the absolute directory  even if the script is run by commands such as   script sh which  without the cd pwd  often gives just    Useless if the script does a cd later on

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FILEPATH  file txt  echo   realpath   dirname  FILEPATH     basename  FILEPATH    This works even if the file doesn t exist  It does require the directory containing the file to exist

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A portable and reliable solution is to use python  which is preinstalled pretty much everywhere  including Darwin   You have two options    abspath returns an absolute path but does not resolve symlinks   python -c  import os sys  print os path abspath sys argv 1     path to file realpath returns an absolute path and in doing so resolves symlinks  generating a canonical path   python -c  import os sys  print os path realpath sys argv 1     path to file   In each case  path to file can be either a relative or absolute path

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I made a builtin-only function to handle this with a focus on highest possible performance  for fun   It does not resolve symlinks  so it is basically the same as realpath -sm      A bash-only mimic of  realpath -sm       Give it path s  as argument s  and it will convert them to clean absolute paths abspath             false   amp  amp     gt  amp 2 echo  FUNCNAME  missing operand  return 1       local c s p IFS          path chunk  absolute path  input path  IFS for splitting paths into chunks   local -i r 0             return value    for p in       do     case   p  in           Check for leading backslashes  identify relative absolute path           r  1    continue                  gt  amp 2 echo  paths             are impl-defined  not my problem     r  2    continue                      p   PWD  p         Prepend the current directory to form an absolute path     esac      s         for c in  p  do        Let IFS split the path at    s       case  c in            NOTE  IFS is      so no quotes needed here                            Skip duplicate    s and      s           s    s           Trim the previous addition to the absolute path string           s    c            NOTE  No quotes here intentionally  They make no difference  it seems       esac      done       echo    s -            If xpg echo is set  use  echo -E  or  printf    s n   instead   done   return  r      Note  This function does not handle paths starting with     as exactly two double slashes at the start of a path are implementation-defined behavior  However  it handles         and so on just fine   This function seems to handle all edge cases properly  but there might still be some out there that I haven t dealt with    Performance Note  when called with thousands of arguments  abspath runs about 10x slower than realpath -sm  when called with a single argument  abspath runs  110x faster than realpath -sm on my machine  mostly due to not needing to execute a new program every time

User · Answer

Old question  but there is much simpler way if you are dealing with full path names at the shell level      abspath     cd   path     pwd     As the cd happens in a subshell it does not impact the main script   Two variations  supposing your shell built-in commands accept -L and -P  are       abspath     cd -P   path     pwd -P        physical path with resolved symlinks    abspath     cd -L   path     pwd -L        logical path preserving symlinks   Personally  I rarely need this later approach unless I m fascinated with symbolic links for some reason   FYI  variation on obtaining the starting directory of a script which works even if the script changes it s current directory later on   name0    basename   0                       base name of script dir0     cd     dirname   0        pwd      absolute starting dir  The use of CD assures you always have the absolute directory  even if the script is run by commands such as   script sh which  without the cd pwd  often gives just    Useless if the script does a cd later on

User · Answer

As Adam Liss noted realpath is not bundled with every distribution  Which is a shame  because it is the best solution  The provided source code is great  and I will probably start using it now  Here is what I have been using until now  which I share here just for completeness   get abs path          local PARENT DIR   dirname   1        cd   PARENT DIR       local ABS PATH    pwd      basename   1         cd -  gt  dev null      echo   ABS PATH       If you want it to resolve symlinks  just replace pwd with pwd -P

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FILEPATH  file txt  echo   realpath   dirname  FILEPATH     basename  FILEPATH    This works even if the file doesn t exist  It does require the directory containing the file to exist

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readlink is the bash standard for obtaining the absolute path   It also has the advantage of returning empty strings if paths or a path doesn t exist  given the flags to do so    To get the absolute path to a directory that may or may not exist  but who s parents do exist  use   abspath   readlink -f  path    To get the absolute path to a directory that must exist along with all parents   abspath   readlink -e  path    To canonicalise the given path and follow symlinks if they happen to exist  but otherwise ignore missing directories and just return the path anyway  it s   abspath   readlink -m  path    The only downside is that readlink will follow links   If you do not want to follow links  you can use this alternative convention   abspath   cd   path      amp  amp  echo  PWD   path         That will chdir to the directory part of  path and print the current directory along with the file part of  path   If it fails to chdir  you get an empty string and an error on stderr

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I don t know if there is a direct bash command to do this  but I usually do  normalDir   cd    dirToNormalize   pwd   echo    normalDir     and it works well

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The problem with realpath is that it is not available on BSD  or OSX for that matter   Here is a simple recipe extracted from a rather old  2009  article from Linux Journal  that is quite portable   function normpath         Remove all     sequences    local path   1                 Remove dir    sequences    while     path                          do     path   path   BASH REMATCH 0       done   echo  path     Notice this variant also does not require the path to exist

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I m late to the party  but this is the solution I ve crafted after reading a bunch of threads like this   resolve dir              builtin cd  dirname    1     HOME       basename    1     HOME    2 gt  dev null  if      -eq 0    then pwd  fi      This will resolve the absolute path of  1  play nice with    keep symlinks in the path where they are  and it won t mess with your directory stack   It returns the full path or nothing if it doesn t exist   It expects  1 to be a directory and will probably fail if it s not  but that s an easy check to do yourself

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Try our new Bash library product realpath-lib that we have placed on GitHub for free and unencumbered use   It s thoroughly documented and makes a great learning tool     It resolves local  relative and absolute paths and doesn t have any dependencies except Bash 4   so it should work just about anywhere   It s free  clean  simple and instructive   You can do   get realpath  lt absolute relative symlink local file path gt    This function is the core of the library   function get realpath      if    -f   1     then        file  must  exist     if cd    echo    1         amp  gt  dev null     then            file  may  not be local           exception is   file ext           try  cd    cd -    works           local tmppwd   PWD          cd -  amp  gt  dev null     else            file  must  be local         local tmppwd   PWD      fi else        file  cannot  exist     return 1   failure fi    reassemble realpath echo   tmppwd     1       return 0   success      It also contains functions to get dirname  get filename  get  stemname and validate path   Try it across platforms  and help to improve it

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I made a builtin-only function to handle this with a focus on highest possible performance  for fun   It does not resolve symlinks  so it is basically the same as realpath -sm      A bash-only mimic of  realpath -sm       Give it path s  as argument s  and it will convert them to clean absolute paths abspath             false   amp  amp     gt  amp 2 echo  FUNCNAME  missing operand  return 1       local c s p IFS          path chunk  absolute path  input path  IFS for splitting paths into chunks   local -i r 0             return value    for p in       do     case   p  in           Check for leading backslashes  identify relative absolute path           r  1    continue                  gt  amp 2 echo  paths             are impl-defined  not my problem     r  2    continue                      p   PWD  p         Prepend the current directory to form an absolute path     esac      s         for c in  p  do        Let IFS split the path at    s       case  c in            NOTE  IFS is      so no quotes needed here                            Skip duplicate    s and      s           s    s           Trim the previous addition to the absolute path string           s    c            NOTE  No quotes here intentionally  They make no difference  it seems       esac      done       echo    s -            If xpg echo is set  use  echo -E  or  printf    s n   instead   done   return  r      Note  This function does not handle paths starting with     as exactly two double slashes at the start of a path are implementation-defined behavior  However  it handles         and so on just fine   This function seems to handle all edge cases properly  but there might still be some out there that I haven t dealt with    Performance Note  when called with thousands of arguments  abspath runs about 10x slower than realpath -sm  when called with a single argument  abspath runs  110x faster than realpath -sm on my machine  mostly due to not needing to execute a new program every time

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Talkative  and a bit late answer  I need to write one since I m stuck on older RHEL4 5  I handles absolute and relative links  and simplifies         and somedir     entries   test -x  usr bin readlink    readlink              echo    bin ls -l  1    bin cut -d  gt   -f 2          test -x  usr bin realpath    realpath          local PATH  bin  usr bin     local inputpath  1     local changemade 1     while    changemade -ne 0       do         changemade 0         local realpath            local token          for token in   inputpath                do              case  token in                       noop                                        up one directory                 changemade 1                 realpath   dirname  realpath                                                    if   -h  realpath  token                    then                     changemade 1                     target  readlink  realpath  token                      if      target 0 1                               then                         realpath  target                     else                         realpath   realpath  target                      fi                 else                     realpath   realpath  token                  fi                                esac         done         inputpath  realpath     done     echo  realpath    mkdir -p  tmp bar  cd  tmp   ln -s  tmp bar foo  ln -s         usr  tmp bar link2usr  echo  realpath  tmp foo

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Try our new Bash library product realpath-lib that we have placed on GitHub for free and unencumbered use   It s thoroughly documented and makes a great learning tool     It resolves local  relative and absolute paths and doesn t have any dependencies except Bash 4   so it should work just about anywhere   It s free  clean  simple and instructive   You can do   get realpath  lt absolute relative symlink local file path gt    This function is the core of the library   function get realpath      if    -f   1     then        file  must  exist     if cd    echo    1         amp  gt  dev null     then            file  may  not be local           exception is   file ext           try  cd    cd -    works           local tmppwd   PWD          cd -  amp  gt  dev null     else            file  must  be local         local tmppwd   PWD      fi else        file  cannot  exist     return 1   failure fi    reassemble realpath echo   tmppwd     1       return 0   success      It also contains functions to get dirname  get filename  get  stemname and validate path   Try it across platforms  and help to improve it

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My recent solution was   pushd foo bar    dir  pwd  popd   Based on the answer of Tim Whitcomb

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A simple solution using node js      usr bin env node process stdout write require  path   resolve process argv 2

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Try realpath  Below is the source in its entirety  hereby donated to the public domain      realpath c  display the absolute path to a file or directory     Adam Liss  August  2007    This program is provided  as-is  to the public domain  without express or    implied warranty  for any non-profit use  provided this notice is maintained    include  lt stdio h gt   include  lt stdlib h gt   include  lt string h gt   include  lt libgen h gt      include  lt limits h gt   static char  s pMyName  void usage void    int main int argc  char  argv          char         sPath PATH MAX         s pMyName   strdup basename argv 0          if  argc  lt  2          usage         printf   s n   realpath argv 1   sPath        return 0         void usage void        fprintf stderr   usage   s PATH n   s pMyName       exit 1

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I needed a solution that would do all three    Work on a stock Mac  realpath and readlink -f are addons Resolve symlinks Have error handling   None of the answers had both  1 and  2   I added  3 to save others any further yak-shaving      bin bash  P    1 Specify a file path      -e   P         echo  File does not exist   P   exit 1     while   -h   P      do     ls    ls -ld   P        link    expr   ls       - gt                 expr   link           gt   dev null  amp  amp          P   link             P    dirname   P    link  done echo    cd    dirname   P     pwd    basename   P      Here is a short test case with some twisted spaces in the paths to fully exercise the quoting  mkdir -p   tmp test  first path   mkdir -p   tmp test  second path   echo  hello   gt    tmp test  first path   red  txt   ln -s   tmp test  first path   red  txt     tmp test  second path   green  txt    cd    tmp test  second path   fullpath   green  txt   cat   green  txt

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Try realpath  Below is the source in its entirety  hereby donated to the public domain      realpath c  display the absolute path to a file or directory     Adam Liss  August  2007    This program is provided  as-is  to the public domain  without express or    implied warranty  for any non-profit use  provided this notice is maintained    include  lt stdio h gt   include  lt stdlib h gt   include  lt string h gt   include  lt libgen h gt      include  lt limits h gt   static char  s pMyName  void usage void    int main int argc  char  argv          char         sPath PATH MAX         s pMyName   strdup basename argv 0          if  argc  lt  2          usage         printf   s n   realpath argv 1   sPath        return 0         void usage void        fprintf stderr   usage   s PATH n   s pMyName       exit 1

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readlink is the bash standard for obtaining the absolute path   It also has the advantage of returning empty strings if paths or a path doesn t exist  given the flags to do so    To get the absolute path to a directory that may or may not exist  but who s parents do exist  use   abspath   readlink -f  path    To get the absolute path to a directory that must exist along with all parents   abspath   readlink -e  path    To canonicalise the given path and follow symlinks if they happen to exist  but otherwise ignore missing directories and just return the path anyway  it s   abspath   readlink -m  path    The only downside is that readlink will follow links   If you do not want to follow links  you can use this alternative convention   abspath   cd   path      amp  amp  echo  PWD   path         That will chdir to the directory part of  path and print the current directory along with the file part of  path   If it fails to chdir  you get an empty string and an error on stderr

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I don t know if there is a direct bash command to do this  but I usually do  normalDir   cd    dirToNormalize   pwd   echo    normalDir     and it works well

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I don t know if there is a direct bash command to do this  but I usually do  normalDir   cd    dirToNormalize   pwd   echo    normalDir     and it works well

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if you re wanting to chomp part of a filename from the path   dirname  and  basename  are your friends  and  realpath  is handy too    dirname  foo bar baz     foo bar  basename  foo bar baz   baz dirname    dirname   foo bar baz        foo  realpath    foo      foo  No such file or directory realpath  tmp    tmp    tmp    tmp   realpath alternatives  If realpath is not supported by your shell  you can try   readlink -f  path here       Also  readlink -m  path there           Works the same as   realpath -s  path here          in that the path doesn t need to exist to be normalized

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I don t know if there is a direct bash command to do this  but I usually do  normalDir   cd    dirToNormalize   pwd   echo    normalDir     and it works well

User · Answer

I know this is an ancient question  I m still offering an alternative  Recently I met the same issue and found no existing and portable command to do that  So I wrote the following shell script which includes a function that can do the trick       bin sh                                                                                                                                                  function normalize     local rc 0   local ret    if      -gt 0     then       invalid     if    x echo  1   grep -E                x      then       echo  1       return -1     fi        convert to absolute path     if    x echo  1   grep -E             x      then       normalize   pwd   1        return        fi      ret  echo  1   sed  s               g    sed  s                                   g     else     read line     normalize   line      return      fi    if    x echo  ret   grep -E                     x      then     ret  normalize   ret       rc      fi    echo   ret    return  rc     https   gist github com bestofsong 8830bdf3e5eb9461d27313c3c282868c

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Not exactly an answer but perhaps a follow-up question  original question was not explicit    readlink is fine if you actually want to follow symlinks  But there is also a use case for merely normalizing    and     and    sequences  which can be done purely syntactically  without canonicalizing symlinks  readlink is no good for this  and neither is realpath   for f in  paths  do  cd  f  pwd   done   works for existing paths  but breaks for others   A sed script would seem to be a good bet  except that you cannot iteratively replace sequences   foo bar baz       -   foo bar    -   foo  without using something like Perl  which is not safe to assume on all systems  or using some ugly loop to compare the output of sed to its input   FWIW  a one-liner using Java  JDK 6     jrunscript -e  for  var i   0  i  lt  arguments length  i     println new java io File new java io File arguments i   toURI   normalize        paths

User · Answer

I discovered today that you can use the stat command to resolve paths.

So for a directory like "~/Documents":

You can run this:

stat -f %N ~/Documents

To get the full path:

/Users/me/Documents

For symlinks, you can use the %Y format option:

stat -f %Y example_symlink

Which might return a result like:

/usr/local/sbin/example_symlink

The formatting options might be different on other versions of *NIX but these worked for me on OSX.

User · Answer

Try realpath  Below is the source in its entirety  hereby donated to the public domain      realpath c  display the absolute path to a file or directory     Adam Liss  August  2007    This program is provided  as-is  to the public domain  without express or    implied warranty  for any non-profit use  provided this notice is maintained    include  lt stdio h gt   include  lt stdlib h gt   include  lt string h gt   include  lt libgen h gt      include  lt limits h gt   static char  s pMyName  void usage void    int main int argc  char  argv          char         sPath PATH MAX         s pMyName   strdup basename argv 0          if  argc  lt  2          usage         printf   s n   realpath argv 1   sPath        return 0         void usage void        fprintf stderr   usage   s PATH n   s pMyName       exit 1

User · Answer

if you re wanting to chomp part of a filename from the path   dirname  and  basename  are your friends  and  realpath  is handy too    dirname  foo bar baz     foo bar  basename  foo bar baz   baz dirname    dirname   foo bar baz        foo  realpath    foo      foo  No such file or directory realpath  tmp    tmp    tmp    tmp   realpath alternatives  If realpath is not supported by your shell  you can try   readlink -f  path here       Also  readlink -m  path there           Works the same as   realpath -s  path here          in that the path doesn t need to exist to be normalized

User · Answer

if you re wanting to chomp part of a filename from the path   dirname  and  basename  are your friends  and  realpath  is handy too    dirname  foo bar baz     foo bar  basename  foo bar baz   baz dirname    dirname   foo bar baz        foo  realpath    foo      foo  No such file or directory realpath  tmp    tmp    tmp    tmp   realpath alternatives  If realpath is not supported by your shell  you can try   readlink -f  path here       Also  readlink -m  path there           Works the same as   realpath -s  path here          in that the path doesn t need to exist to be normalized

User · Answer

The problem with realpath is that it is not available on BSD  or OSX for that matter   Here is a simple recipe extracted from a rather old  2009  article from Linux Journal  that is quite portable   function normpath         Remove all     sequences    local path   1                 Remove dir    sequences    while     path                          do     path   path   BASH REMATCH 0       done   echo  path     Notice this variant also does not require the path to exist

User · Answer

Try realpath  Below is the source in its entirety  hereby donated to the public domain      realpath c  display the absolute path to a file or directory     Adam Liss  August  2007    This program is provided  as-is  to the public domain  without express or    implied warranty  for any non-profit use  provided this notice is maintained    include  lt stdio h gt   include  lt stdlib h gt   include  lt string h gt   include  lt libgen h gt      include  lt limits h gt   static char  s pMyName  void usage void    int main int argc  char  argv          char         sPath PATH MAX         s pMyName   strdup basename argv 0          if  argc  lt  2          usage         printf   s n   realpath argv 1   sPath        return 0         void usage void        fprintf stderr   usage   s PATH n   s pMyName       exit 1

User · Answer

I m late to the party  but this is the solution I ve crafted after reading a bunch of threads like this   resolve dir              builtin cd  dirname    1     HOME       basename    1     HOME    2 gt  dev null  if      -eq 0    then pwd  fi      This will resolve the absolute path of  1  play nice with    keep symlinks in the path where they are  and it won t mess with your directory stack   It returns the full path or nothing if it doesn t exist   It expects  1 to be a directory and will probably fail if it s not  but that s an easy check to do yourself

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Based on  Andre s answer  I might have a slightly better version  in case someone is after a loop-free  completely string-manipulation based solution  It is also useful for those who don t want to dereference any symlinks  which is the downside of using realpath or readlink -f   It works on bash versions 3 2 25 and higher   shopt -s extglob  normalise path         local path   1        get rid of      example   one    two to  two     path    path                            get rid of     and     example   one     two to  one two     path    path                              remove the last          echo    path            normalise path  home codemedic    codemedic     config  home codemedic  config

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Based on loveborg s excellent python snippet  I wrote this      bin sh    Version of readlink that follows links to the end  good for Mac OS X  for file in       do   while   -h   file     do     l  readlink  file      case   l  in           file   l             file  dirname   file     l      esac   done    echo  file   python -c  import os sys  print os path abspath sys argv 1      file  done

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My recent solution was   pushd foo bar    dir  pwd  popd   Based on the answer of Tim Whitcomb

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As Adam Liss noted realpath is not bundled with every distribution  Which is a shame  because it is the best solution  The provided source code is great  and I will probably start using it now  Here is what I have been using until now  which I share here just for completeness   get abs path          local PARENT DIR   dirname   1        cd   PARENT DIR       local ABS PATH    pwd      basename   1         cd -  gt  dev null      echo   ABS PATH       If you want it to resolve symlinks  just replace pwd with pwd -P

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Talkative  and a bit late answer  I need to write one since I m stuck on older RHEL4 5  I handles absolute and relative links  and simplifies         and somedir     entries   test -x  usr bin readlink    readlink              echo    bin ls -l  1    bin cut -d  gt   -f 2          test -x  usr bin realpath    realpath          local PATH  bin  usr bin     local inputpath  1     local changemade 1     while    changemade -ne 0       do         changemade 0         local realpath            local token          for token in   inputpath                do              case  token in                       noop                                        up one directory                 changemade 1                 realpath   dirname  realpath                                                    if   -h  realpath  token                    then                     changemade 1                     target  readlink  realpath  token                      if      target 0 1                               then                         realpath  target                     else                         realpath   realpath  target                      fi                 else                     realpath   realpath  token                  fi                                esac         done         inputpath  realpath     done     echo  realpath    mkdir -p  tmp bar  cd  tmp   ln -s  tmp bar foo  ln -s         usr  tmp bar link2usr  echo  realpath  tmp foo

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Use the readlink utility from the coreutils package   MY PATH   readlink -f   0

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Use the readlink utility from the coreutils package   MY PATH   readlink -f   0

User · Answer

Not exactly an answer but perhaps a follow-up question  original question was not explicit    readlink is fine if you actually want to follow symlinks  But there is also a use case for merely normalizing    and     and    sequences  which can be done purely syntactically  without canonicalizing symlinks  readlink is no good for this  and neither is realpath   for f in  paths  do  cd  f  pwd   done   works for existing paths  but breaks for others   A sed script would seem to be a good bet  except that you cannot iteratively replace sequences   foo bar baz       -   foo bar    -   foo  without using something like Perl  which is not safe to assume on all systems  or using some ugly loop to compare the output of sed to its input   FWIW  a one-liner using Java  JDK 6     jrunscript -e  for  var i   0  i  lt  arguments length  i     println new java io File new java io File arguments i   toURI   normalize        paths

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I know this is an ancient question  I m still offering an alternative  Recently I met the same issue and found no existing and portable command to do that  So I wrote the following shell script which includes a function that can do the trick       bin sh                                                                                                                                                  function normalize     local rc 0   local ret    if      -gt 0     then       invalid     if    x echo  1   grep -E                x      then       echo  1       return -1     fi        convert to absolute path     if    x echo  1   grep -E             x      then       normalize   pwd   1        return        fi      ret  echo  1   sed  s               g    sed  s                                   g     else     read line     normalize   line      return      fi    if    x echo  ret   grep -E                     x      then     ret  normalize   ret       rc      fi    echo   ret    return  rc     https   gist github com bestofsong 8830bdf3e5eb9461d27313c3c282868c

User · Answer

if you re wanting to chomp part of a filename from the path   dirname  and  basename  are your friends  and  realpath  is handy too    dirname  foo bar baz     foo bar  basename  foo bar baz   baz dirname    dirname   foo bar baz        foo  realpath    foo      foo  No such file or directory realpath  tmp    tmp    tmp    tmp   realpath alternatives  If realpath is not supported by your shell  you can try   readlink -f  path here       Also  readlink -m  path there           Works the same as   realpath -s  path here          in that the path doesn t need to exist to be normalized

User · Answer

Based on  Andre s answer  I might have a slightly better version  in case someone is after a loop-free  completely string-manipulation based solution  It is also useful for those who don t want to dereference any symlinks  which is the downside of using realpath or readlink -f   It works on bash versions 3 2 25 and higher   shopt -s extglob  normalise path         local path   1        get rid of      example   one    two to  two     path    path                            get rid of     and     example   one     two to  one two     path    path                              remove the last          echo    path            normalise path  home codemedic    codemedic     config  home codemedic  config

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A portable and reliable solution is to use python  which is preinstalled pretty much everywhere  including Darwin   You have two options    abspath returns an absolute path but does not resolve symlinks   python -c  import os sys  print os path abspath sys argv 1     path to file realpath returns an absolute path and in doing so resolves symlinks  generating a canonical path   python -c  import os sys  print os path realpath sys argv 1     path to file   In each case  path to file can be either a relative or absolute path

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I needed a solution that would do all three    Work on a stock Mac  realpath and readlink -f are addons Resolve symlinks Have error handling   None of the answers had both  1 and  2   I added  3 to save others any further yak-shaving      bin bash  P    1 Specify a file path      -e   P         echo  File does not exist   P   exit 1     while   -h   P      do     ls    ls -ld   P        link    expr   ls       - gt                 expr   link           gt   dev null  amp  amp          P   link             P    dirname   P    link  done echo    cd    dirname   P     pwd    basename   P      Here is a short test case with some twisted spaces in the paths to fully exercise the quoting  mkdir -p   tmp test  first path   mkdir -p   tmp test  second path   echo  hello   gt    tmp test  first path   red  txt   ln -s   tmp test  first path   red  txt     tmp test  second path   green  txt    cd    tmp test  second path   fullpath   green  txt   cat   green  txt

[linux] How do you normalize a file path in Bash?

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