Relative to Absolute Path in Shell Script

Simple bash function to convert relative paths to absolute pats
fun_abs
{ echo “`cd \`dirname $1\`; pwd`/`basename $1`” }

http://www.robertpeaslee.com/index.php/converting-a-relative-path-to-an-absolute-path-in-bash/

UPDATE: unfortuately the above only works for directories that exist - the perl hack will get around this

fun_abs
{FILE=`$PERL -e "use File::Spec::Functions qw[rel2abs];print rel2abs('$1');"`; echo "$FILE"; }