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Suppose I'm running bash on a Unix-ish system - not necessarily Linux and not necessarily very new; and it may not have every bit of software I'd like.

Now, I have a relative path for which I want to get the absolute path. What's the most robust and portable way of doing this?

The answers here seem to mostly assume the GNU core utilities are installed, which I would rather not do.

Bonus points if your answer works on any Bourne Shell variant.

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  • One way to be more portable than using pwd and changing dirs(and it's funny that you want a robust way to get absolute paths but didn't said changing dirs were allowed, and also considered this "safer" than install gnu readlink) is to make a little utility in C using realpath() function - stackoverflow.com/a/229038/2231796 Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 18:54
  • @nwildner: A C compiler is definitely not installed on every system you know... Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 21:14
  • Maybe you should add this to your answer, that it requires a portable solution that could also range from embedded to powerfull servers... Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 22:39

3 Answers 3

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I am not sure if the environment variable $PWD was set in the bourne shell, but the command pwd exists since the old minix and is part of POSIX, so:

abs_path="$(cd "$rel_path" && pwd -P)"
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  • +1 for the first suggestion, but the second suggestion is the opposite of what I need, i.e. something I can really not bank on. Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 21:15
  • Fair point @einpoklum , readlink removed. Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 22:51
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What I do now is 

absolute_path="$(cd "$relative_path"; echo "$PWD")"

I wonder if Bourne Shell had $PWD though.

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    PWD is in POSIX at least. To avoid the echo, you may use pwd -P: abs_path="$( cd "$rel_path" && pwd -P )" Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 14:33
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You can use the Cwd core module from Perl. This module provides functions for determining the pathname of the current working directory.

perl -MCwd -le 'print Cwd::realpath("foo")'

Perl is generally already installed on Linux and Unix. This module has been a part of Perl-5 core since 1994.

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  • If I ssh'ed into some minimalistic netbsd distribution embedded on some device - do you think it would have perl 5 and this module? Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 21:17

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