On this face of it, this is a real newbie question that I'm kind of embarrased to ask but here goes anyway ...

Given an absolute pathname as a base (say: /usr/local/src) and a relative path (say: ../bin/fnurgle) what module will give the 'canonical' absolute pathname: /usr/local/bin/fnurgle?

I thought this was one of the functions of the File::Spec module but this code ...

perl -MFile::Spec -le 'print File::Spec->rel2abs("../bin/fnurgle", "/usr/local/src")'

... gives this ...

/usr/local/src/../bin/fnurgle

... and so does this ...

perl -MFile::Spec -le 'print File::Spec->canonpath(File::Spec->rel2abs("../bin/fnurgle", "/usr/local/src"))'

I can achieve the desired effect using a regex or even prepending 'file:' and using the URI module but shouldn't this be the default behaviour of File::Spec->canonpath()?

In reply to Absolute pathnames from relative? by grantm

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