Get the full path to a file in Linux / Unix

In the last post I showed you how to point to a file in windows and get the full path copied to your clipboard.  I wanted to come up with something similar for a Linux environment.  This is helpful on Vampire/ACCRE because you have to fully qualify the path to every file you use when you submit jobs with PBS scripts. So I wrote a little perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
chomp($pwd=`pwd`);
print "$pwd\n" if @ARGV==0;
foreach (@ARGV) {print "$pwd/$_\n";}

You can copy this from me, just put it in your bin directory, like this:

cp /home/turnersd/bin/path ~/bin

Make it executable, like this:

chmod +x ~/bin/path

Here it is in action. Let's say I wanted to print out the full path to all the .txt files in the current directory.  Call the program with arguments as the files you want to print the path to:


[turnersd@vmps21 replicated]$ ls
parseitnow.pbs
parsing_program.pl
replic.txt
tophits.txt
 
[turnersd@vmps21 replicated]$ path *.txt
/projects/HDL/epistasis/replicated/replic.txt
/projects/HDL/epistasis/replicated/tophits.txt


Sure, it's only a little bit quicker than typing pwd, copying that, then spelling out the filenames.  But if you have long filenames or lots of filenames you want to copy, this should get things done faster.  Enjoy.