How to resolve symbolic links in a shell script

Question

Given an absolute or relative path (in a Unix-like system), I would like to determine the full path of the target after resolving any intermediate symlinks. Bonus points for

Answer 1

Here's how one can get the actual path to the file in MacOS/Unix using an inline Perl script:

FILE=$(perl -e "use Cwd qw(abs_path); print abs_path('$0')")

Similarly, to get the directory of a symlinked file:

DIR=$(perl -e "use Cwd qw(abs_path); use File::Basename; print dirname(abs_path('$0'))")