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

Common shell scripts often have to find their "home" directory even if they are invoked as a symlink. The script thus have to find their "real" position from just $0.

cat `mvn`

on my system prints a script containing the following, which should be a good hint at what you need.

if [ -z "$M2_HOME" ] ; then
  ## resolve links - $0 may be a link to maven's home
  PRG="$0"

  # need this for relative symlinks
  while [ -h "$PRG" ] ; do
    ls=`ls -ld "$PRG"`
    link=`expr "$ls" : '.*-> \(.*\)$'`
    if expr "$link" : '/.*' > /dev/null; then
      PRG="$link"
    else
      PRG="`dirname "$PRG"`/$link"
    fi
  done

  saveddir=`pwd`

  M2_HOME=`dirname "$PRG"`/..

  # make it fully qualified
  M2_HOME=`cd "$M2_HOME" && pwd`