sh-realpath
A portable, pure shell implementation of realpath
Copy the functions in realpath.sh into your shell script to
avoid introducing a dependency on either realpath
or readlink -f
, since:
realpath
does not come installed by defaultreadlink -f
is not portable to OS-X (relevant man page)
Usage
$ source ./realpath.sh
$ realpath /proc/self
/proc/2772
Or we can get tricky:
$ cd /tmp
$ mkdir -p somedir/targetdir somedir/anotherdir
$ ln -s somedir somedirlink
$ ln -s somedir/anotherdir/../anotherlink somelink
$ ln -s targetdir/targetpath somedir/anotherlink
$ realpath .///somedirlink/././anotherdir/../../somelink
/tmp/somedir/targetdir/targetpath
API
Note: unlike realpath(1)
, these functions take no options; do not use --
to escape any arguments
Function | Description |
---|
realpath PATH| Resolve all symlinks to `PATH`, then output the canonicalized result
resolve_symlinks PATH| If `PATH` is a symlink, follow it as many times as possible; output the path of the first non-symlink found
canonicalize_path PATH| Output absolute path that `PATH` refers to, resolving any relative directories (`.`, `..`) in `PATH` and any symlinks in `PATH`'s ancestor directories
readlink Emulation
realpath.sh
includes optional readlink emulation. It exposes a readlink
function that calls the system readlink(1)
if it exists. Otherwise it uses
stat(1)
to emulate the same functionality. In contrast to the functions in
the previous section, you may pass --
as the first argument, since you may be
calling the system readlink(1)
.