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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting getting full path from relative path Post 302110787 by jim mcnamara on Thursday 15th of March 2007 09:58:21 AM
Old 03-15-2007
This is why relative paths have problems sometimes. There isn't a good way to handle absolutely any relative path, because all relative paths have an assumption:

the current working directory is "x".

You are assuming /home/polypus. Unix tools are designed to do one thing very well. It's hard to make a bulletproof tool because of the cwd assumption.

Because:
Obviously it may not be true.

So, there is no really elegant way to deal with it. You're onto one way to deal with it.
For programming, you should consider avoiding relative paths unless you want the code to work if and only if it runs from a certain directory.
 

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File::Spec::Unix(3pm)					User Contributed Perl Documentation				     File::Spec::Unix(3pm)

NAME
File::Spec::Unix - File::Spec for Unix, base for other File::Spec modules SYNOPSIS
require File::Spec::Unix; # Done automatically by File::Spec DESCRIPTION
Methods for manipulating file specifications. Other File::Spec modules, such as File::Spec::Mac, inherit from File::Spec::Unix and override specific methods. METHODS
canonpath() No physical check on the filesystem, but a logical cleanup of a path. On UNIX eliminates successive slashes and successive "/.". $cpath = File::Spec->canonpath( $path ) ; Note that this does *not* collapse x/../y sections into y. This is by design. If /foo on your system is a symlink to /bar/baz, then /foo/../quux is actually /bar/quux, not /quux as a naive ../-removal would give you. If you want to do this kind of processing, you probably want "Cwd"'s "realpath()" function to actually traverse the filesystem cleaning up paths like this. catdir() Concatenate two or more directory names to form a complete path ending with a directory. But remove the trailing slash from the resulting string, because it doesn't look good, isn't necessary and confuses OS2. Of course, if this is the root directory, don't cut off the trailing slash :-) catfile Concatenate one or more directory names and a filename to form a complete path ending with a filename curdir Returns a string representation of the current directory. "." on UNIX. devnull Returns a string representation of the null device. "/dev/null" on UNIX. rootdir Returns a string representation of the root directory. "/" on UNIX. tmpdir Returns a string representation of the first writable directory from the following list or the current directory if none from the list are writable: $ENV{TMPDIR} /tmp Since perl 5.8.0, if running under taint mode, and if $ENV{TMPDIR} is tainted, it is not used. updir Returns a string representation of the parent directory. ".." on UNIX. no_upwards Given a list of file names, strip out those that refer to a parent directory. (Does not strip symlinks, only '.', '..', and equivalents.) case_tolerant Returns a true or false value indicating, respectively, that alphabetic is not or is significant when comparing file specifications. file_name_is_absolute Takes as argument a path and returns true if it is an absolute path. This does not consult the local filesystem on Unix, Win32, OS/2 or Mac OS (Classic). It does consult the working environment for VMS (see "file_name_is_absolute" in File::Spec::VMS). path Takes no argument, returns the environment variable PATH as an array. join join is the same as catfile. splitpath ($volume,$directories,$file) = File::Spec->splitpath( $path ); ($volume,$directories,$file) = File::Spec->splitpath( $path, $no_file ); Splits a path into volume, directory, and filename portions. On systems with no concept of volume, returns '' for volume. For systems with no syntax differentiating filenames from directories, assumes that the last file is a path unless $no_file is true or a trailing separator or /. or /.. is present. On Unix this means that $no_file true makes this return ( '', $path, '' ). The directory portion may or may not be returned with a trailing '/'. The results can be passed to "catpath()" to get back a path equivalent to (usually identical to) the original path. splitdir The opposite of "catdir()". @dirs = File::Spec->splitdir( $directories ); $directories must be only the directory portion of the path on systems that have the concept of a volume or that have path syntax that differentiates files from directories. Unlike just splitting the directories on the separator, empty directory names ('') can be returned, because these are significant on some OSs. On Unix, File::Spec->splitdir( "/a/b//c/" ); Yields: ( '', 'a', 'b', '', 'c', '' ) catpath() Takes volume, directory and file portions and returns an entire path. Under Unix, $volume is ignored, and directory and file are concatenated. A '/' is inserted if needed (though if the directory portion doesn't start with '/' it is not added). On other OSs, $volume is significant. abs2rel Takes a destination path and an optional base path returns a relative path from the base path to the destination path: $rel_path = File::Spec->abs2rel( $path ) ; $rel_path = File::Spec->abs2rel( $path, $base ) ; If $base is not present or '', then cwd() is used. If $base is relative, then it is converted to absolute form using "rel2abs()". This means that it is taken to be relative to cwd(). On systems that have a grammar that indicates filenames, this ignores the $base filename. Otherwise all path components are assumed to be directories. If $path is relative, it is converted to absolute form using "rel2abs()". This means that it is taken to be relative to cwd(). No checks against the filesystem are made. On VMS, there is interaction with the working environment, as logicals and macros are expanded. Based on code written by Shigio Yamaguchi. rel2abs() Converts a relative path to an absolute path. $abs_path = File::Spec->rel2abs( $path ) ; $abs_path = File::Spec->rel2abs( $path, $base ) ; If $base is not present or '', then cwd() is used. If $base is relative, then it is converted to absolute form using "rel2abs()". This means that it is taken to be relative to cwd(). On systems that have a grammar that indicates filenames, this ignores the $base filename. Otherwise all path components are assumed to be directories. If $path is absolute, it is cleaned up and returned using "canonpath()". No checks against the filesystem are made. On VMS, there is interaction with the working environment, as logicals and macros are expanded. Based on code written by Shigio Yamaguchi. COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 2004 by the Perl 5 Porters. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. SEE ALSO
File::Spec perl v5.14.2 2010-09-20 File::Spec::Unix(3pm)
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