How to Get the Absolute Directory of a File in Bash

How to obtain the absolute path of a file via Shell (BASH/ZSH/SH)?

Use realpath

$ realpath example.txt
/home/username/example.txt

How to get full path of a file?

Use readlink:

readlink -f file.txt

How do I get the absolute directory of a file in Bash?

To get the full path use:

readlink -f relative/path/to/file

To get the directory of a file:

dirname relative/path/to/file

You can also combine the two:

dirname $(readlink -f relative/path/to/file)

If readlink -f is not available on your system you can use this^*:

function myreadlink() {
  (
  cd "$(dirname $1)"         # or  cd "${1%/*}"
  echo "$PWD/$(basename $1)" # or  echo "$PWD/${1##*/}"
  )
}

Note that if you only need to move to a directory of a file specified as a relative path, you don't need to know the absolute path, a relative path is perfectly legal, so just use:

cd $(dirname relative/path/to/file)

if you wish to go back (while the script is running) to the original path, use pushd instead of cd, and popd when you are done.

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* While myreadlink above is good enough in the context of this question, it has some limitation relative to the readlink tool suggested above. For example it doesn't correctly follow a link to a file with different basename.

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

Here's what I've come up with (edit: plus some tweaks provided by sfstewman, levigroker, Kyle Strand, and Rob Kennedy), that seems to mostly fit my "better" criteria:

SCRIPTPATH="$( cd -- "$(dirname "$0")" >/dev/null 2>&1 ; pwd -P )"

That SCRIPTPATH line seems particularly roundabout, but we need it rather than SCRIPTPATH=`pwd` in order to properly handle spaces and symlinks.

The inclusion of output redirection (>/dev/null 2>&1) handles the rare(?) case where cd might produce output that would interfere with the surrounding $( ... ) capture. (Such as cd being overridden to also ls a directory after switching to it.)

Note also that esoteric situations, such as executing a script that isn't coming from a file in an accessible file system at all (which is perfectly possible), is not catered to there (or in any of the other answers I've seen).

The -- after cd and before "$0" are in case the directory starts with a -.

How to retrieve absolute path given relative

use:

find "$(pwd)"/ -type f

to get all files or

echo "$(pwd)/$line"

to display full path (if relative path matters to)

How to extract directory path from file path?

dirname and basename are the tools you're looking for for extracting path components:

$ VAR='/home/pax/file.c'
$ DIR="$(dirname "${VAR}")" ; FILE="$(basename "${VAR}")"
$ echo "[${DIR}] [${FILE}]"
[/home/pax] [file.c]

They're not internal bash commands but they are part of the POSIX standard - see dirname and basename. Hence, they're probably available on, or can be obtained for, most platforms that are capable of running bash.

Bash - Print the full path of a file from $PATH

In bash, to locate a file (script) in the users path, you can use the which command: (https://ss64.com/bash/which.html), but as @Jetchisel says there are better alternatives for POSIX-compliant shells; see 'which' vs 'command -v' in Bash

How can I generate a list of files with their absolute path in Linux?

If you give find an absolute path to start with, it will print absolute paths. For instance, to find all .htaccess files in the current directory:

find "$(pwd)" -name .htaccess

or if your shell expands $PWD to the current directory:

find "$PWD" -name .htaccess

find simply prepends the path it was given to a relative path to the file from that path.

Greg Hewgill also suggested using pwd -P if you want to resolve symlinks in your current directory.

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