The Gospel According to Graybeard

realpath

Quick note post. I wanted to document this handy little Unix command for spitting out the absolute path of a file:

cd ~/projects/<project>/docs
ls
thing.md
realpath thing.md
/path/to/home/projects/<project>/docs/thing.md

So, if thing.md lives at ~/projects//docs/thing.md, we'd get something like...

/path/to/home/projects/<project>/docs/thing.md

Especially when dealing with LLMs (needing to reference paths on your machine for the LLM to read), this is a handy one to have floating around your brain.

My only gripe is this has that old school linux command naming style when it should be something like ap or abspath. Aliases to the rescue!

alias ap="realpath"
alias abspath="realpath"
alias absolute_path="realpath"

Pop this in your Bash or ZSH config and open a new terminal:

cd ~/projects/<project>/docs
ls
thing.md
ap thing.md
/path/to/home/projects/<project>/docs/thing.md

Enjoy!