Replace PHP's realpath()

Question

Apparently, realpath is very buggy. In PHP 5.3.1, it causes random crashes. In 5.3.0 and less, realpath randomly fails and returns false (for the s

Answer 1

I have never heard of such massive problems with realpath() (I always thought that it just interfaces some underlying OS functionality - would be interested in some links), but the User Contributed Notes to the manual page have a number of alternative implementations. Here is one that looks okay.

Of course, it's not guaranteed these implementations take care of all cross-platform quirks and issues, so you'd have to do thorough testing to see whether it suits your needs.

As far as I can see though, none of them returns a canonicalized path, they only resolve relative paths. If you need that, I'm not sure whether you can get around realpath() (except perhaps executing a (system-dependent) console command that gives you the full path.)