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

This works with multiple separators and does not assume the given path should exist:

p=/foo///.//bar///foo1/bar1//foo2/./bar2; 
echo $p | awk '{while(index($1,"/./")) gsub("/./","/"); while(index($1,"//"))
     gsub("//","/");  print $1;}'

But does not simplify well strings containing ".."