mjhjmtu

What is actual path? Consider folder A in the file system and a symlinked B to it. Consider currently in ranger (or terminal) inside a sub-directory within B such as /home/B/sub1/sub2 which is in fact /another_but_actual_path/A/sub1/sub2. What I want is to have a tool/command/script which convert the relative path to the actual path. I mean while pwd shows /home/B/sub1/sub2, I want to access the path /another_but_actual_path/A/sub1/sub2.

p.s. I tried readlink but it couldn't give me the actual path.

p.s. I don't know if so called actual path has a name or not.

The standard Linux "coreutils" package contains a command realpath.

This will follow any and all symbolics links for the named path, and return the "real" path associated with it.

So:

$ mkdir -p /tmp/foo/bar
$ ln -s /tmp/foo $HOME/foo
$ realpath $HOME/foo
/tmp/foo
$ realpath $HOME/foo/bar
/tmp/foo/bar
$ realpath $HOME/foo/bar/baz
/tmp/foo/bar/baz

We can see that the link $HOME/foo is being replaced by the real path of /tmp/foo.

The last entry need not exist, but all intermediate points must.

$ realpath $HOME/foo/bar/baz/qux
realpath: '/home/sweh/foo/bar/baz/qux': No such file or directory

That's because there is no baz directory.

In Ranger you can use the gl and gL commands. Type g, then:

key command
 L cd -r %f
 l cd -r .