This seems like such a simple question but I don't know it.

Given a file, how do I get it's path/location? You're going to say "duh, if you're given a file, then you must have it's path." But no, what if the file is given on command line? You may only have the filename. You could run cwd() and get the local path, but what if the user typed like "../.././file.xml" or something. Now you have to manually parse the ../'s. (Luckily perl is a good parsing language.) plus it could be like a symlink or something. Or, the file is a real file but one of the directories was a sym link to another directory.

stat() doesn't include the file's path in it's results. http://www.xav.com/perl/lib/Pod/perlfunc.html#item_stat

I can think of some hackish ways to do this but I'm hoping there's something cleaner using the built-in perl functs.

Thanks

In reply to How to get a file's full path? by Bog

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