rel2abs doesn't resolve relative paths?

Cirollo has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Consider running this from the directory /home/myuser:

use File::Spec::Functions qw/rel2abs/;
print rel2abs("../bob/");'
__END__
/home/myuser/../bob
[download]

Shouldn't rel2abs get rid of the '..' and print "/home/bob" instead of "/home/myuser/../bob"? If that's not the expected behavior, are there any standard functions that would return "/home/bob" or will I have to write my own subroutine to get rid of the ..'s?

Comment on rel2abs doesn't resolve relative paths? Download Code

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Re: rel2abs doesn't resolve relative paths? (use Cwd) by grinder (Bishop) on Jun 05, 2003 at 16:01 UTC
It's not a bug, it's a feature! See the discussion in Absolute pathnames from relative?. A number of solutions are posted there, usually involving the Cwd module. _____________________________________________ Come to YAPC::Europe 2003 in Paris, 23-25 July 2003.	[reply]
Re: rel2abs doesn't resolve relative paths? by halley (Prior) on Jun 05, 2003 at 15:31 UTC
The definition of "absolute" just means it starts with a slash. Some people refer to your intended result as a "canonical" path, and removing all backtracking as the "canonicalization" of a path. There are other elements to canonicalization, such as discovering aliased mount points or symlinks. Perhaps something like this will work for you. `1 while ($path =~ s{ [^/]+ / \.\. / }{}x);` [download] -- `[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]`	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: rel2abs doesn't resolve relative paths? by tye (Sage) on Jun 05, 2003 at 15:36 UTC
And it is too bad that canonpath from File::Spec doesn't do even this (based on my testing on two systems, one Unix, one Win32). - tye	[reply]
Re: rel2abs doesn't resolve relative paths? by Oberon (Monk) on Jun 07, 2003 at 01:17 UTC
> ... are there any standard functions that would return "/home/bob" or will I have to write my own subroutine to get rid of the ..'s? My solution to this problem has been to grab File::VirtualPath. It's not standard, but at least you wouldn't have to write your own ... `# warning! untested code ahead use File::VirtualPath; my $p = File::VirtualPath->new(); $p->path("/home/myuser"); # or use cwd() $p->chdir("../bob/"); print $p->path_string(); # should yield /home/bob` [download] And of course you could wrap all that up in a sub if you like. I like this particular solution because it works even if you're referring to a path that doesn't exist (maybe it doesn't exist yet, but it will, or it's a path to something other than a physical file in the file system). HTH.	[reply] [d/l]

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