Simplify a path containing ".."

Question

I'd like to simplify a path containing parent directory (..) references, but without making it absolute.

E.g., a path like foo/bar/../baz should be simplified to foo/baz since the bar/.. part cancels out¹.

¹ Strictly speaking, this is not true if bar is a symlink somewhere else - but feel free to ignore this: I don't care if the simplification returns different results than the original path in the presence of symlinks.

`foo/bar/../baz` is not necessarily the same as `foo/baz` if `foo/bar` is a synlink. — Stéphane Chazelas, Dec 05 '19 at 21:37
@StéphaneChazelas - I think I covered that well in the footnote, and I'm OK if there is a difference in that case. Is anything unclear in that note? — BeeOnRope, Dec 05 '19 at 22:25
@Networker - based on the question, no (I am explicitly asking for a _relative_ path as output and that question is explicitly about getting an _absolute_ path). — BeeOnRope, Dec 09 '19 at 20:29

Ravexina · Answer 1 · 2019-12-05T21:19:44.767

3

I guess what you are looking for is realpath:

$ realpath --relative-to="$PWD" "foo/bar/../baz"
foo/baz

it also works fine with symlinks, use -s to ignore them:

-s, --strip, --no-symlinks don't expand symlinks

edited Dec 05 '19 at 21:19

answered Dec 05 '19 at 21:14

Ravexina

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Simplify a path containing ".."

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