Bash script absolute path with OS X

Question

I am trying to obtain the absolute path to the currently running script on OS X.

I saw many replies going for readlink -f $0. However since OS X\'s

Answer 1

Ugh. I found the prior answers a bit wanting for a few reasons: in particular, they don't resolve multiple levels of symbolic links, and they are extremely "Bash-y". While the original question does explicitly ask for a "Bash script", it also makes mention of Mac OS X's BSD-like, non-GNU readlink. So here's an attempt at some reasonable portability (I've checked it with bash as 'sh' and dash), resolving an arbitrary number of symbolic links; and it should also work with whitespace in the path(s), although I'm not sure of the behavior if there is white space the base name of the utility itself, so maybe, um, avoid that?

#!/bin/sh
realpath() {
  OURPWD=$PWD
  cd "$(dirname "$1")"
  LINK=$(readlink "$(basename "$1")")
  while [ "$LINK" ]; do
    cd "$(dirname "$LINK")"
    LINK=$(readlink "$(basename "$1")")
  done
  REALPATH="$PWD/$(basename "$1")"
  cd "$OURPWD"
  echo "$REALPATH"
}
realpath "$@"

Hope that can be of some use to someone.