Reliable way for a Bash script to get the full path to itself

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I have a Bash script that needs to know its full path. I'm trying to find a broadly-compatible way of doing that without ending up with relative or funky-looking paths. I only need to support Bash, not sh, csh, etc.

What I've found so far:

The accepted answer to Getting the source directory of a Bash script from within addresses getting the path of the script via dirname $0, which is fine, but that may return a relative path (like .), which is a problem if you want to change directories in the script and have the path still point to the script's directory. Still, dirname will be part of the puzzle.
The accepted answer to Bash script absolute path with OS X (OS X specific, but the answer works regardless) gives a function that will test to see if $0 looks relative and if so will pre-pend $PWD to it. But the result can still have relative bits in it (although overall it's absolute) — for instance, if the script is t in the directory /usr/bin and you're in /usr and you type bin/../bin/t to run it (yes, that's convoluted), you end up with /usr/bin/../bin as the script's directory path. Which works, but...

The readlink solution on this page, which looks like this:

# Absolute path to this script. /home/user/bin/foo.sh
SCRIPT=$(readlink -f $0)
# Absolute path this script is in. /home/user/bin
SCRIPTPATH=`dirname $SCRIPT`

Just for the hell of it I've done a bit of hacking on a script that does things purely textually, purely in Bash. I hope I caught all the edge cases.

Note that the ${var//pat/repl} that I mentioned in the other answer doesn't work since you can't make it replace only the shortest possible match, which is a problem for replacing /foo/../ as e.g. /*/../ will take everything before it, not just a single entry. And since these patterns aren't really regexes I don't see how that can be made to work. So here's the nicely convoluted solution I came up with, enjoy. ;)

By the way, let me know if you find any unhandled edge cases.

#!/bin/bash

canonicalize_path() {
  local path="$1"
  OIFS="$IFS"
  IFS=$'/'
  read -a parts < <(echo "$path")
  IFS="$OIFS"

  local i=${#parts[@]}
  local j=0
  local back=0
  local -a rev_canon
  while (($i > 0)); do
    ((i--))
    case "${parts[$i]}" in
      ""|.) ;;
      ..) ((back++));;
      *) if (($back > 0)); then
           ((back--))
         else
           rev_canon[j]="${parts[$i]}"
           ((j++))
         fi;;
    esac
  done
  while (($j > 0)); do
    ((j--))
    echo -n "/${rev_canon[$j]}"
  done
  echo
}

canonicalize_path "/.././..////../foo/./bar//foo/bar/.././bar/../foo/bar/./../..//../foo///bar/"

answered 2011-01-23T14:53:44.360

Reliable way for a Bash script to get the full path to itself

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