Remove unnecessary slashes from a given path with bash

Question

How can I get rid of unnecessary slashes in a given path?

Example:

p=\"/foo//////bar///hello/////world\"

I want:

p=\"/f         


        

Answer 1

1. Consider if you need to do this. On Unix, specifying duplicate path separators (and even things like /foo/.//bar///hello/./world work just fine.
2. You can use readlink -f, but this will also canonicalize the symlinks in that path, so the result depends on your filesystem and the path supplied must actually exist, so this won't work for virtual paths.