I feel stupid -- determine the full path to a file

[Shane Hathaway]

Michael L Torrie wrote:
> Andrew McNabb wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 12:47:32PM -0700, Shane Hathaway wrote:
>>> abspath=$(cd $(dirname $fn); pwd)/$(basename $fn)
>> Okay.  Yours it better than mine. :)
> 
> Wow.  Awesome.  Bash is just one giant hack, isn't it.
> 
> My solution, thanks to Byron clark is:
> 
> abspath=$( readlink -f $fn )
> 
> readlink is part of the standard GNU coreutils.

That's clearly the best answer, aside from Jonathan's sound
recommendation to write the script in Python instead. :-)

Shane