100 Useful Command-Line Utilities

by Oliver; 2014

32. readlink

readlink provides a way to get the absolute path of a directory.

Get the absolute path of the directory mydir:

$ readlink -m mydir

Get the absolute path of the cwd:

$ readlink -m .

Note this is different than:

$ pwd

because I'm using the term absolute path to express not only that the path is not a relative path, but also to denote that it's free of symbolic links. So if we have the link discussed above:

~/MYLINK --> /some/long/and/complicated/path/to/an/often/used/directory

then:

$ cd ~/MYLINK
$ readlink -m . 
/some/long/and/complicated/path/to/an/often/used/directory

One profound annoyance: readlink doesn't work the same way on Mac unix (Darwin). To get the proper one, you need to download the GNU coreutils.

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