|
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | ATTRIBUTES | CONFORMING TO | NOTES | BUGS | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
REALPATH(3) Linux Programmer's Manual REALPATH(3)
realpath - return the canonicalized absolute pathname
#include <limits.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
char *realpath(const char *path, char *resolved_path);
Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):
realpath():
_XOPEN_SOURCE >= 500
|| /* Glibc since 2.19: */ _DEFAULT_SOURCE
|| /* Glibc versions <= 2.19: */ _BSD_SOURCE
realpath() expands all symbolic links and resolves references to /./,
/../ and extra '/' characters in the null-terminated string named by
path to produce a canonicalized absolute pathname. The resulting
pathname is stored as a null-terminated string, up to a maximum of
PATH_MAX bytes, in the buffer pointed to by resolved_path. The
resulting path will have no symbolic link, /./ or /../ components.
If resolved_path is specified as NULL, then realpath() uses malloc(3)
to allocate a buffer of up to PATH_MAX bytes to hold the resolved
pathname, and returns a pointer to this buffer. The caller should
deallocate this buffer using free(3).
If there is no error, realpath() returns a pointer to the
resolved_path.
Otherwise, it returns NULL, the contents of the array resolved_path
are undefined, and errno is set to indicate the error.
EACCES Read or search permission was denied for a component of the
path prefix.
EINVAL path is NULL. (In glibc versions before 2.3, this error is
also returned if resolved_path is NULL.)
EIO An I/O error occurred while reading from the filesystem.
ELOOP Too many symbolic links were encountered in translating the
pathname.
ENAMETOOLONG
A component of a pathname exceeded NAME_MAX characters, or an
entire pathname exceeded PATH_MAX characters.
ENOENT The named file does not exist.
ENOMEM Out of memory.
ENOTDIR
A component of the path prefix is not a directory.
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see
attributes(7).
┌───────────┬───────────────┬─────────┐
│Interface │ Attribute │ Value │
├───────────┼───────────────┼─────────┤
│realpath() │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe │
└───────────┴───────────────┴─────────┘
4.4BSD, POSIX.1-2001.
POSIX.1-2001 says that the behavior if resolved_path is NULL is
implementation-defined. POSIX.1-2008 specifies the behavior
described in this page.
In 4.4BSD and Solaris, the limit on the pathname length is MAXPATHLEN
(found in <sys/param.h>). SUSv2 prescribes PATH_MAX and NAME_MAX, as
found in <limits.h> or provided by the pathconf(3) function. A
typical source fragment would be
#ifdef PATH_MAX
path_max = PATH_MAX;
#else
path_max = pathconf(path, _PC_PATH_MAX);
if (path_max <= 0)
path_max = 4096;
#endif
(But see the BUGS section.)
GNU extensions
If the call fails with either EACCES or ENOENT and resolved_path is
not NULL, then the prefix of path that is not readable or does not
exist is returned in resolved_path.
The POSIX.1-2001 standard version of this function is broken by
design, since it is impossible to determine a suitable size for the
output buffer, resolved_path. According to POSIX.1-2001 a buffer of
size PATH_MAX suffices, but PATH_MAX need not be a defined constant,
and may have to be obtained using pathconf(3). And asking
pathconf(3) does not really help, since, on the one hand POSIX warns
that the result of pathconf(3) may be huge and unsuitable for
mallocing memory, and on the other hand pathconf(3) may return -1 to
signify that PATH_MAX is not bounded. The resolved_path == NULL
feature, not standardized in POSIX.1-2001, but standardized in
POSIX.1-2008, allows this design problem to be avoided.
realpath(1), readlink(2), canonicalize_file_name(3), getcwd(3),
pathconf(3), sysconf(3)
This page is part of release 4.12 of the Linux man-pages project. A
description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and the
latest version of this page, can be found at
https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
2016-10-08 REALPATH(3)
Pages that refer to this page: dpkg-shlibdeps(1), readlink(2), bindtextdomain(3), canonicalize_file_name(3), matchpathcon(3), selinux_restorecon(3)