<p>Given an absolute or relative path (in a Unix-like system), I would like to determine the full path of the target after resolving any intermediate symlinks. Bonus points for also resolving ~username notation at the same time.</p>

<p>If the target is a directory, it might be possible to chdir() into the directory and then call getcwd(), but I really want to do this from a shell script rather than writing a C helper. Unfortunately, shells have a tendency to try to hide the existence of symlinks from the user (this is bash on OS X):</p>

<pre><code>$ ls -ld foo bar
drwxr-xr-x   2 greg  greg  68 Aug 11 22:36 bar
lrwxr-xr-x   1 greg  greg   3 Aug 11 22:36 foo -&gt; bar
$ cd foo
$ pwd
/Users/greg/tmp/foo
$
</code></pre>

<p>What I want is a function resolve() such that when executed from the tmp directory in the above example, resolve("foo") == "/Users/greg/tmp/bar".</p>

According to the standards,
```
pwd -P
```
should return the path with symlinks resolved.
C function
```
char *getcwd(char *buf, size_t size)
```
from
```
unistd.h
```
should have the same behaviour.
getcwd
pwd