Linux print absolute path

Getting the Absolute (Full) and Relative Path In Linux

This article explains absolute paths and how they differ from relative paths, getting them, and how symbolic links are handled.

FileSystem Paths

A path is the location of a file in a file system. It’s the directions to the file in the folder it is located.

A path consists of a string of characters. Some represent directory names, and a separator character separates the directory names from the file name and extension.

Consider the below path:

• Forward slashes (/) to separate directories from their subdirectories
• Directory Names – the text between the forward slashes
• The file name – in this case, file.txt

Relative Paths

Relative paths are paths that are defined in relation to your current position in the file system.

You can find your current position using the pwd command:

Relative paths begin without a forward slash, or a . or ...

• Paths beginning without a / or with a . start in the current directory
• Paths beginning with .. start in the directory above the current directory (the parent of the current directory)

Example

If you are in the directory /home/user:

…and it contains a file called test.txt, you need only type:

…to view the contents of the file, as you are in the same directory as that file, and can access it using its relative path.

In the above example, the cd command is used to change the directory, and the cat command reads the contents of the file to the screen.

Absolute Paths

Absolute paths can be used from anywhere on the filesystem. They represent the full path of the file from the root (the very top) of the file system hierarchy. They are absolute because it’s the absolute location of the file on the file system. It is not relative to where you are or where you might be; the path will work when called from any location.

Example

Consider again that we are in the directory /home/user:

…and there is a file called another.txt located at /var/temp. Attempting to open it by running:

…will fail because that file doesn’t exist at /home/user. We can, however, access it at its absolute path:

As it provides the full location of the file and does not rely on the relative path we are currently situated.

Paths and Hard / Soft Links (symlinks)

Soft links (symlinks) are just files that point to another file. The absolute path is still the path to the symlink. If you want the path to the linked file itself, you will need to use the readlink command to find the absolute path of the linked file:

Hard links are also absolute paths – the data exists at multiple absolute paths but in only one location on the physical disk.

Brad Morton

I’m Brad, and I’m nearing 20 years of experience with Linux. I’ve worked in just about every IT role there is before taking the leap into software development. Currently, I’m building desktop and web-based solutions with NodeJS and PHP hosted on Linux infrastructure. Visit my blog or find me on Twitter to see what I’m up to.

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Display or print UNIX / Linux path

I am a new Linux or Unix system user and I am using a Debian Linux VPS. How do I print current path settings under BASH or sh or ksh shell?

In Linux or Unix-like file systems, the human-readable address of a resource is defined by PATH shell variable. On Unix / Linux like operating systems, (as well as on DOS / Windows and its descendants), PATH is an environment variable listing a set of paths to directories where executable may be found. This page explains how to print path variable using various commands under Linux and Unix-like systems.

Tutorial details
Difficulty level	Easy
Root privileges	No
Requirements	Linux, Unix, or macOS terminal app
Est. reading time	2 minutes

Display current PATH in Linux

Use the echo command as follows:
echo «$PATH»
Here is my settings from Debian Linux system:

You can use the printf command as well to show the current PATH settings:
$ printf «%s\n» $PATH
Here is my settings from macOS/macOS X Unix desktop:

What is a PATH in Linux or Unix?

A PATH is nothing but the search path for commands. It is a colon-separated list of directories in which the shell looks for commands.

How to modify current PATH

Use the export command to add /opt/games to PATH, enter:
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/games
To format your PATH variable for easy viewing, add following code to your bash startup file (such as

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Now just run path:
$ path
Here is what I see on CentOS/RHEL/Fedora Linux:

Another option is to run the following command:
echo «$PATH» | tr «:» «\n» | nl

Fig.01: Printing $PATH on Linux or Unix-like system

Summing up

The default shell path ( $PATH variable) is system-dependent, and is set by the administrator who installs bash or ksh or any other shell. However, developers and other Linux and Unix system users can set up their own path using the export command under bash/sh/ksh.

Setting up PATH permanently

Users can edit the

/.profile to set up their path as follows for bash:

Printing PATH in Linux or Unix

Now run:
echo «$PATH»
printf «%s\n», $PATH

How to Checking Path in Unix and Linux

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Comments on this entry are closed.

accepts an optional argument that is the name of a path-like variable.

Hi,
I did not get either of those path() working. I assume my version of unix does not recognize IFS when applying printf. But this works:

echo $PATH | sed ‘s/\:/\n/g’ | sort

Thanks for that, Pekka. I started using zsh, which has the same problem you described. The original solution works wonderfully in bash, but yours works in zsh.

Ugghh curly quotes. Could not copy and paste.

I am using Zshell, Prezto, OSX. The sed command replaces the : with an n

To get one path per line I used:

Hello Sir;
I am trying to run a program on a cluster and every time I run the program I have this message: mpiexec was unable to launch the specified application as it could not find an executable. ”
so I am suggesting that the program is not recognize the mpixec path. so I need to add the MPI path in my working directory.
my question is how to set this up?

hola necesito decargar un editor ok lo descargo en superusuario y cuando esta descargando me dice q no puede continuar … me aparece esto : dpkg: aviso: `ldconfig’ no se ha encontrado en el PATH o no es ejecutable.
dpkg: aviso: `start-stop-daemon’ no se ha encontrado en el PATH o no es ejecutable.
dpkg: error: 2 expected programs not found in PATH or not executable.
Note: root’s PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin.
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
Un paquete no se pudo instalar. Tratando de recuperarlo:
dpkg: aviso: `ldconfig’ no se ha encontrado en el PATH o no es ejecutable.
dpkg: aviso: `start-stop-daemon’ no se ha encontrado en el PATH o no es ejecutable.
dpkg: error: 2 expected programs not found in PATH or not executable.
Note: root’s PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin, /usr/sbin and /sbin.
help me..

In below code:
Node=/liferay-portal-5.2.0/jboss-tomcat-4.2.3/server/node_portal
export jboss=$Node/../..
echo $jboss

But I need Output as :

Please help me out in this.

How can I make PATH easily to view when I just execute the script? Thanks

You can search/replace within variables as you expand them.
The following replaces ‘:’ with newlines while expanding $PATH, so it’s done without using external commands:

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Absolute and Relative Pathnames in UNIX

A path is a unique location to a file or a folder in a file system of an OS.A path to a file is a combination of / and alpha-numeric characters.

Absolute Path-name

An absolute path is defined as the specifying the location of a file or directory from the root directory(/).
To write an absolute path-name:

• Start at the root directory ( / ) and work down.
• Write a slash ( / ) after every directory name (last one is optional)

For Example :

will work only if the fie “abc.sql” exists in your current directory. However, if this file is not present in your working directory and is present somewhere else say in /home/kt , then this command will work only if you will use it like shown below:

In the above example, if the first character of a pathname is /, the file’s location must be determined with respect to root. When you have more than one / in a pathname, for each such /, you have to descend one level in the file system like in the above kt is one level below home, and thus two levels below root.

An absolute path is defined as specifying the location of a file or directory from the root directory(/). In other words,we can say that an absolute path is a complete path from start of actual file system from / directory.

Relative path

Relative path is defined as the path related to the present working directly(pwd). It starts at your current directory and never starts with a / .

To be more specific let’s take a look on the below figure in which if we are looking for photos then absolute path for it will be provided as /home/jono/photos but assuming that we are already present in jono directory then the relative path for the same can be written as simple photos.

Using . and .. in Relative Path-names

UNIX offers a shortcut in the relative pathname– that uses either the current or parent directory as reference and specifies the path relative to it. A relative path-name uses one of these cryptic symbols:

Now, what this actually means is that if we are currently in directory /home/kt/abc and now you can use .. as an argument to cd to move to the parent directory /home/kt as :

NOTE:Now / when used with .. has a different meaning ;instead of moving down a level,it moves one level up:

Example of Absolute and Relative Path

Suppose you are currently located in home/kt and you want to change your directory to home/kt/abc. Let’s see both the absolute and relative path concepts to do this:

1. Changing directory with relative path concept :
2. Changing directory with absolute path concept:

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