How to retrieve absolute path given relative
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
Solution 1:
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".
Solution 2:
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)
Solution 3:
#! /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 runningpwdshell command - After that we append basename to absolute path:
$(basename "$1") - As final step we
echoit
Solution 4:
use:
find "$(pwd)"/ -type f
to get all files or
echo "$(pwd)/$line"
to display full path (if relative path matters to)
Solution 5:
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.