Obtaining a canonical file path

Question

In OCaml, how can I obtain a canonical file path, equivalent to Java's File.getCanonicalPath() (that is, a normalized absolute path)?

Module Filename has a dirname function, but it does not normalize file paths such as /etc/../usr into /usr, for instance.

Basile Starynkevitch · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-25T11:07:53.837

3

JaneStreet Ocaml Core has Filename.realpath.

Also, google for ocaml realpath (see realpath(3) in C; you might code some wrapper for it)

edited Mar 25 '16 at 11:07

answered Feb 05 '16 at 09:44

Basile Starynkevitch

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Realpath is useless in case of non-existing files/directories. – Anton Kochkov Sep 21 '18 at 04:50
Yes, but so what? Is the OP's question mentioning that? – Basile Starynkevitch Sep 21 '18 at 04:52
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It didn't, just a reminder that `realpath` is not generic enough. – Anton Kochkov Sep 21 '18 at 05:30

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 05 '16 at 16:33

Our phat library defines normalized rather precisely. The library is overkill for most use cases, but we wrote it for applications that deal heavily with the file system. We'll release to opam soon, but for now you'll have to do a couple of pins. Here is a full working example:

$ opam pin add solvuu_build https://github.com/solvuu/solvuu_build
$ opam pin add phat https://github.com/solvuu/phat.git
$ utop
# #require "phat.pure";;
# module Phat = Phat_pure.Std;;
# Phat.(abs_dir "/a/../b/./c/d/" |> ok_exn |> normalize |> to_string);;
- : string = "/b/c/d"

Obtaining a canonical file path

2 Answers2