How to resolve symbolic links in a shell script

Question

Given an absolute or relative path (in a Unix-like system), I would like to determine the full path of the target after resolving any intermediate symlinks. Bonus points for

Answer 1

"pwd -P" seems to work if you just want the directory, but if for some reason you want the name of the actual executable I don't think that helps. Here's my solution:

#!/bin/bash

# get the absolute path of the executable
SELF_PATH=$(cd -P -- "$(dirname -- "$0")" && pwd -P) && SELF_PATH=$SELF_PATH/$(basename -- "$0")

# resolve symlinks
while [[ -h $SELF_PATH ]]; do
    # 1) cd to directory of the symlink
    # 2) cd to the directory of where the symlink points
    # 3) get the pwd
    # 4) append the basename
    DIR=$(dirname -- "$SELF_PATH")
    SYM=$(readlink "$SELF_PATH")
    SELF_PATH=$(cd "$DIR" && cd "$(dirname -- "$SYM")" && pwd)/$(basename -- "$SYM")
done