given a relative path, how do i convert it into a full one. i.e. if i am in

/home/polypus

and i am given foo/bar then to get a full path i can just concatinate it with pwd, but what if i am given "../mama"

how do i programmatically convert:

/home/polypus and ../mama into /home/mama

in a way that will always work no matter what relative path is passed?

my first thought is to just cd to the directory and set a variable

cd $rev_path
full_path=`pwd`
cd $original_dir

it seems there must be a unix command which does this more elegantly?

thanks