There are many instances on SO where people have asked how best to absolutize a path in bash, but I haven't found any that deal with absolutizing non-yet-existent paths.
The cd $1 && pwd method does not work at all for non-existent paths.
The readlink -f $1 method will only work for one level of non-existence; that is, it will work for "~/sdkjf", but not for "~/sdkjf/qweuio"
Ideally, I would like a method that would expand the latter to /home/username/sdkjf/qweuio ... and would also do similar transforms for ./ and ../
Can you recommend a solution?
readlink -m $1
From the manpage:
-m, --canonicalize-missing
canonicalize by following every symlink in every component of the given
name recursively, without requirements on components existence