[pacman-dev] [PATCH] repo-add: bash implementation of realpath

[Sebastian Nowicki]

On 16/02/2009, at 6:25 PM, Xavier wrote:

> Before moving forward, I have a question :
> is there any good and portable way to convert between absolute and
> relative paths?
> I don't see any reason for doing any symlinks resolution anywhere.
> The only thing we need is to convert a given path (which can be either
> absolute or relative) to an absolute path.
> We need this because we are changing directories, and these paths have
> to stay valid so have to be absolute.

After a bit of Googling I haven't been able to find a solution. On the  
contrary, many posts indicate that there is no cross-platform way - at  
least not without introducing huge dependencies (python/ruby/etc).  
It's weird considering that there's a standard C function[1] which  
does exactly this. A semi-ugly solution would be to provide an  
executable which simply calls this function, as part of the pacman  
package. However, if the speed difference is not that important, the  
bash implementation is a nicer solution.

[1]: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/functions/realpath.html