Answer by hluk for bash/fish command to print absolute path to a file

If you don't have readlink or realpath utilities than you can use following function which works in bash and zsh (not sure about the rest).

abspath () { case "$1" in /*)printf "%s\n" "$1";; *)printf "%s\n" "$PWD/$1";; esac; }

This also works for nonexistent files (as does the python function os.path.abspath).

Unfortunately abspath ./../somefile doesn't get rid of the dots.