How can you quickly get the complete path to a file for use in terminal?
7 Answers
readlink -f foo.bar
or (install it first)
realpath foo.bar
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2The downside of
readlink
is that it will work even if the file doesn't exist. This can perpetuate bugs in very odd ways.– GregRosJun 28, 2018 at 17:30 -
to copy the path to the os clipboard
realpath foo.bar | xclip -selection c
Feb 20, 2020 at 12:58
Just drag and drop the file in the terminal.
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1I'm putting this here so that I don't forget, let's hope it helps some of you :D Jan 26, 2011 at 19:33
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Returns an "smb://" prefixed path for SMB mounted shares instead of the actual mounted path.– KupiakosSep 26, 2013 at 23:21
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@Kupiakos: for me, gnome-terminal happily translates the dropped file path to
'/home/alexcohn/.gvfs/…'
Mar 17, 2014 at 15:11
All good answers; Here is a tip for another situation.
If you are browsing your files using nautilus and you want the complete path of your current directory, then press CTRL+L
. This changes the breadcrumb buttons temporarily back to the old-style address bar, allowing you to copy the path.
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… but this is still
smb://
-style, so it cannot be reused in terminal. Mar 17, 2014 at 12:36 -
Interesting; on my system (Ubuntu 13.10) I do not get a
smb://
-style path.– SiccoMar 17, 2014 at 13:03 -
Exactly what I was looking for, I mean the terminal is a great place to ls but there is those times you work in a file folder views : ' ) Feb 1, 2017 at 6:25
If it's an executable, then execute (in a terminal):
$ which your_executable
For example: $ which ls
In addition to dragging the icon, there are a few ways to get the full path without nautilus (or thunar, konqueror, et al.). You would then triple-click or click-drag and copy, potentially saving this in your clipboard manager*, and paste it where you need.
(pastie, klipper, glippy, glipper, anamnesis)
You can use
find
in a directory above your file. (If you don't know where it is, start where your shell drops you, [generally] in the top of your home directory.)
find . | egrep filename
You can use
locate
to get the filename. (Runsudo updatedb
if that hasn't been done recently.)
A more realistic example of using find would be something like :
$ find | egrep askubuntu | grep txt
./askubuntu-temp.txt
./drDocuments/web/meta.askubuntu.txt
./other/stuff/askubuntu.txt.iteration.1
./other/stuff/askubuntu.txt.iteration.2
[...]
To cut out the ones you don't like, e.g.:
find | egrep askubuntu | grep txt | egrep -v iteration
find | egrep askubuntu | grep txt | egrep -v 'iteration|meta|other'
locate is used much the same way, though grep is frequently more necessary:
locate myfile | egrep home | egrep -v 'mozilla|cache|local|bin|\.pyc|test' | grep \.py
This isn't the most efficient way to type this, but usually if I've lost a file, I do this iteratively, adding grep clauses as I go.
Easily done in python using os.realpath()
function:
$ python -c 'import os,sys;print(os.path.realpath(sys.argv[1]))' ./VirtualBox\ VMs/
/mnt/HDD/VirtualBox VMs
From a related answer,you can also use readlink
$ readlink -e ./out.txt
/home/username/out.txt
If you simply copy a file in Nautilus, then the full path is copied.
Then paste it in the terminal.
By simply pasting you get:
file:///home/juan/2017/agenda20170101.html
If you right-click and choose "Paste filenames" then you get:
'/home/juan/2017/agenda20170101.html'
with the quotes as shown.
This differs from Windows, that copies the file content instead of its name.