Re: Making a path absolute portably

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 10 Jul 2019, Sébastien Hinderer wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I'd need to compute the absolute path of srcdir in a portable way (it's
> okay if it includes symlinks).
>
> Currently I use
>
> abssrcdir=$(cd "${srcdir}"; echo $PWD)
> which seems to work fine.
>
> Is that considered portable enough?

It appears that $PWD is a shell extension, so I don't think so.  Even 
the shell syntax being used to execute the external command is not 
very portable.  In addition to that, if the cd "${srcdir}" fails, it 
would then capture the wrong directory.

This syntax is proven to be portable and reliable:

abssrcdir="`cd $srcdir && pwd`"

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
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