Re: New coreutil? realpath - retrieve canonicalized absolute path

[Sebastian Rasmussen]

Hi!

> "How do I canonicalize a path" is a common
> question in my experience, so making `readlink -f` better known with 
> documentation
> would help. It would be great if `apropos
> canonicalize` returned it.

Ok, a patch along the lines of

diff -Npruw coreutils-cvs/man/readlink.x 
coreutils-cvs.newpatch/man/readlink.x
--- coreutils-cvs/man/readlink.x        2003-01-09 21:36:55.000000000 +0100
+++ coreutils-cvs.newpatch/man/readlink.x       2005-07-19 
12:38:27.000000000 +0
200
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
[NAME]
-readlink \- display value of a symbolic link
+readlink \- display value of a symbolic link and canonicalize paths
[DESCRIPTION]
.\" Add any additional description here

would solve that problem.

> For the record I have `alias realpath='readlink -f'`.
> Also FreeBSD has a realpath util as of 4.3

Maybe the latter is incentive enough to add it coreutils as well? But I 
guess that a realpath in
coreutils should reuse the canonicalization code
developed for readlink -f in that case, instead of
wrapping realpath(3) anew.

/ Sebastian Rasmussen