How do you normalize a file path in Bash?

if you're wanting to chomp part of a filename from the path, "dirname" and "basename" are your friends, and "realpath" is handy too.

dirname /foo/bar/baz 
# /foo/bar 
basename /foo/bar/baz
# baz
dirname $( dirname  /foo/bar/baz  ) 
# /foo 
realpath ../foo
# ../foo: No such file or directory
realpath /tmp/../tmp/../tmp
# /tmp

realpath alternatives

If realpath is not supported by your shell, you can try

readlink -f /path/here/.. 

Also

readlink -m /path/there/../../ 

Works the same as

realpath -s /path/here/../../

in that the path doesn't need to exist to be normalized.

I don't know if there is a direct bash command to do this, but I usually do

normalDir="`cd "${dirToNormalize}";pwd`"
echo "${normalDir}"

and it works well.

Try realpath. Below is the source in its entirety, hereby donated to the public domain.

// realpath.c: display the absolute path to a file or directory.
// Adam Liss, August, 2007
// This program is provided "as-is" to the public domain, without express or
// implied warranty, for any non-profit use, provided this notice is maintained.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <libgen.h>   
#include <limits.h>

static char *s_pMyName;
void usage(void);

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    char
        sPath[PATH_MAX];


    s_pMyName = strdup(basename(argv[0]));

    if (argc < 2)
        usage();

    printf("%s\n", realpath(argv[1], sPath));
    return 0;
}    

void usage(void)
{
    fprintf(stderr, "usage: %s PATH\n", s_pMyName);
    exit(1);
}

I made a builtin-only function to handle this with a focus on highest possible performance (for fun). It does not resolve symlinks, so it is basically the same as realpath -sm.

## A bash-only mimic of `realpath -sm`. 
## Give it path[s] as argument[s] and it will convert them to clean absolute paths
abspath () { 
  ${*+false} && { >&2 echo $FUNCNAME: missing operand; return 1; };
  local c s p IFS='/';  ## path chunk, absolute path, input path, IFS for splitting paths into chunks
  local -i r=0;         ## return value

  for p in "$@"; do
    case "$p" in        ## Check for leading backslashes, identify relative/absolute path
    '') ((r|=1)); continue;;
    //[!/]*)  >&2 echo "paths =~ ^//[^/]* are impl-defined; not my problem"; ((r|=2)); continue;;
    /*) ;;
    *)  p="$PWD/$p";;   ## Prepend the current directory to form an absolute path
    esac

    s='';
    for c in $p; do     ## Let IFS split the path at '/'s
      case $c in        ### NOTE: IFS is '/'; so no quotes needed here
      ''|.) ;;          ## Skip duplicate '/'s and '/./'s
      ..) s="${s%/*}";; ## Trim the previous addition to the absolute path string
      *)  s+=/$c;;      ### NOTE: No quotes here intentionally. They make no difference, it seems
      esac;
    done;

    echo "${s:-/}";     ## If xpg_echo is set, use `echo -E` or `printf $'%s\n'` instead
  done
  return $r;
}

Note: This function does not handle paths starting with //, as exactly two double slashes at the start of a path are implementation-defined behavior. However, it handles /, ///, and so on just fine.

This function seems to handle all edge cases properly, but there might still be some out there that I haven't dealt with.

Performance Note: when called with thousands of arguments, abspath runs about 10x slower than realpath -sm; when called with a single argument, abspath runs >110x faster than realpath -sm on my machine, mostly due to not needing to execute a new program every time.

If you just want to normalize a path, existed or not existed, without touching the file system, without resolving any links, and without external utils, here is a pure Bash function translated from Python's posixpath.normpath.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Normalize path, eliminating double slashes, etc.
# Usage: new_path="$(normpath "${old_path}")"
# Translated from Python's posixpath.normpath:
# https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/posixpath.py#L337
normpath() {
  local IFS=/ initial_slashes='' comp comps=()
  if [[ $1 == /* ]]; then
    initial_slashes='/'
    [[ $1 == //* && $1 != ///* ]] && initial_slashes='//'
  fi
  for comp in $1; do
    [[ -z ${comp} || ${comp} == '.' ]] && continue
    if [[ ${comp} != '..' || (-z ${initial_slashes} && ${#comps[@]} -eq 0) || (\
      ${#comps[@]} -gt 0 && ${comps[-1]} == '..') ]]; then
      comps+=("${comp}")
    elif ((${#comps[@]})); then
      unset 'comps[-1]'
    fi
  done
  comp="${initial_slashes}${comps[*]}"
  printf '%s\n' "${comp:-.}"
}

Examples:

new_path="$(normpath '/foo/bar/..')"
echo "${new_path}"
# /foo

normpath "relative/path/with trailing slashs////"
# relative/path/with trailing slashs

normpath "////a/../lot/././/mess////./here/./../"
# /lot/mess

normpath ""
# .
# (empty path resolved to dot)

Personally, I cannot understand why Shell, a language often used for manipulating files, doesn't offer basic functions to deal with paths. In python, we have nice libraries like os.path or pathlib, which offers a whole bunch of tools to extract filename, extension, basename, path segments, split or join paths, to get absolute or normalized paths, to determine relations between paths, to do everything without much brain. And they take care of edge cases, and they're reliable. In Shell, to do any of these, either we call external executables, or we have to reinvent wheels with these extremely rudimentary and arcane syntaxes...

I needed a solution that would do all three:

• Work on a stock Mac. realpath and readlink -f are addons
• Resolve symlinks
• Have error handling

None of the answers had both #1 and #2. I added #3 to save others any further yak-shaving.

#!/bin/bash

P="${1?Specify a file path}"

[ -e "$P" ] || { echo "File does not exist: $P"; exit 1; }

while [ -h "$P" ] ; do
    ls="$(ls -ld "$P")"
    link="$(expr "$ls" : '.*-> \(.*\)$')"
    expr "$link" : '/.*' > /dev/null &&
        P="$link" ||
        P="$(dirname "$P")/$link"
done
echo "$(cd "$(dirname "$P")"; pwd)/$(basename "$P")"

Here is a short test case with some twisted spaces in the paths to fully exercise the quoting

mkdir -p "/tmp/test/ first path "
mkdir -p "/tmp/test/ second path "
echo "hello" > "/tmp/test/ first path / red .txt "
ln -s "/tmp/test/ first path / red .txt " "/tmp/test/ second path / green .txt "

cd  "/tmp/test/ second path "
fullpath " green .txt "
cat " green .txt "

Since none of the presented solutions worked for me, in the case where a file does not exist, I implemented my idea. The solution of André Anjos had the problem that paths beginning with ../../ were resolved wrongly. For example ../../a/b/ became a/b/.

function normalize_rel_path(){
  local path=$1
  result=""
  IFS='/' read -r -a array <<< "$path"
  i=0
  for (( idx=${#array[@]}-1 ; idx>=0 ; idx-- )) ; do
    c="${array[idx]}"
    if [ -z "$c" ] || [[ "$c" == "." ]];
    then
      continue
    fi
    if [[ "$c" == ".." ]]
    then
      i=$((i+1))
    elif [ "$i" -gt "0" ];
    then
      i=$((i-1))
    else
      if [ -z "$result" ];
      then
        result=$c
      else
        result=$c/$result
      fi
    fi
  done
  while [ "$i" -gt "0" ]; do
    i=$((i-1))
    result="../"$result
  done  
  unset IFS
  echo $result
}