On Wed, 27 Oct 2010, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

> On 2010-10-27 11:34:44 +0200, Jérémie Roquet wrote:
>> 2010/10/27 Nikolai Weibull>:
>>> How do I get the absolute path of a path?  The only thing I can find 
>>> is the :a modifier for history expansion.
>>
>> your_path(:a)
>>
>> For example .(:a) is pwd
>
> BTW, is there a way to get the canonicalised absolute pathname with 
> zsh? (i.e. what the "realpath" command gives.)

With new enough Zsh, you can use: the ':A' modifier.

As a workaround, though, since I have to use older Zsh'es on various 
systems, I have:

# uses Perl, since that tends to be more consistent than 'realpath' 
# across the systems I was using this on:

A () { reply=("$(perl -MCwd=realpath -we 'print realpath shift' $REPLY)") }

Then, instead of:

your_path(:A)   -- returns the realpath in new Zsh'es.

you can do:

your_path(+A)   -- calls the 'A' function above to find the realpath

-- 
Best,
Ben