portable realpath

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Antonio Sun <antoniosun-N9AOi2cAC9ZBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>

| Anyone knows a portable way to get realpath, ie, the canonical file name of
| a symbolic link?

I find the term "canonical" odd.  I realized that the term is (at
least) used in realpath(1).  But files in UNIX and Linux don't have
canonical names (i.e. a guaranteed to be unique name).

- a volume can be mounted more than one place

- a file can have multiple names (hard links), all of equal status.

Normally there are no hard links to directories (unless you count .
and ..), but that restriction has been questioned.

What realpath -f does is simply replace symbolic links by their referents.  
Perhaps it could be called evaluation or dereferencing.
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