How to get full path of a file?

Question

Is there an easy way I can print the full path of file.txt ?

file.txt = /nfs/an/disks/jj/home/dir/file.txt

The

Answer 1

On Windows:

• Holding Shift and right clicking on a file in Windows Explorer gives you an option called Copy as Path. This will copy the full path of the file to clipboard.

On Linux:

• You can use the command realpath yourfile to get the full path of a file as suggested by others.

Answer 2

I know there's an easier way that this, but darned if I can find it...

jcomeau@intrepid:~$ python -c 'import os; print(os.path.abspath("cat.wav"))'
/home/jcomeau/cat.wav

---

jcomeau@intrepid:~$ ls $PWD/cat.wav
/home/jcomeau/cat.wav

Answer 3

If you are in the same directory as the file:

ls "`pwd`/file.txt"

Replace file.txt with your target filename.

Answer 4

I know that this is an old question now, but just to add to the information here:

The Linux command which can be used to find the filepath of a command file, i.e.

$ which ls
/bin/ls

There are some caveats to this; please see https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-do-i-find-the-path-to-a-command-file/.

Answer 5

find / -samefile file.txt -print

Will find all the links to the file with the same inode number as file.txt

adding a -xdev flag will avoid find to cross device boundaries ("mount points"). (But this will probably cause nothing to be found if the find does not start at a directory on the same device as file.txt)

Do note that find can report multiple paths for a single filesystem object, because an Inode can be linked by more than one directory entry, possibly even using different names. For instance:

find /bin -samefile /bin/gunzip -ls

Will output:

12845178    4 -rwxr-xr-x   2 root     root         2251 feb  9  2012 /bin/uncompress
12845178    4 -rwxr-xr-x   2 root     root         2251 feb  9  2012 /bin/gunzip

Answer 6

For Mac OS X, I replaced the utilities that come with the operating system and replaced them with a newer version of coreutils. This allows you to access tools like readlink -f (for absolute path to files) and realpath (absolute path to directories) on your Mac.

The Homebrew version appends a 'G' (for GNU Tools) in front of the command name -- so the equivalents become greadlink -f FILE and grealpath DIRECTORY.

Instructions for how to install the coreutils/GNU Tools on Mac OS X through Homebrew can be found in this StackExchange arcticle.

NB: The readlink -f and realpath commands should work out of the box for non-Mac Unix users.