Answer by bsingh for How to obtain the absolute path of a file via Shell (BASH/ZSH/SH)?

For directories dirname gets tripped for ../ and returns ./.

nolan6000's function can be modified to fix that:

get_abs_filename() {  # $1 : relative filename  if [ -d "${1%/*}" ]; then    echo "$(cd ${1%/*}; pwd)/${1##*/}"  fi}