Re: Absolute pathnames from relative?

I myself come from a long family of dentists, and there have always loved toothpicks. I hereby present my solution in the form of an incurable form of falling toothpick syndrome;

s/\/[^\/]*\/\.\.\//\//g
[download]

Just set this baby on your concatenated paths, and your '..' will magically disappear. You could use

s/\/\.\//\/g
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to strip your single dots as well...

This will just give you the path it 'should' be, if there are no weird filesystem thingies going on.

(yes, I could've used s### or something, but this is more fun.)

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Re^2: Absolute pathnames from relative? by graff (Chancellor) on Oct 15, 2005 at 16:34 UTC
Oy veh! This is a case where hairdressers might write the less frightening code, using curlies: `s{/[^/]*/+\.{2}/}{/}g;` [download] (~~also switched to using positive-lookahead to check for the final "/" in the pattern, so as to avoid the need for a loop;~~ and just in case the input is "goofy but functional", ala "/one/two//../three", I added "+"). (Update: never mind what I said about positive-lookahead. There seems to be no way to avoid using a loop to make this "work", so no point using "(?=/)" as the last part of the match. This was never intended as a serious solution anyway, given the issues discussed in other replies.)	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Absolute pathnames from relative? by argv (Pilgrim) on Nov 20, 2004 at 03:36 UTC
You said: `s/\/[^\/]\/\.\.\//\//g` which is exactly what I was looking for... but it doesn't work if there are two together, as in "foo/bar/../../baz/" So, put it in a loop: `1 while $foo =~ s/\/[^\/]\/\.\.\//\//g;` dan www.danheller.com	[reply] [d/l] [select]