Finding where an executable was run from -- a proposal.

[David Collier-Brown]

In article <5307 at bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> wesommer at athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld) writes:
| I remarked (in private mail) to John Gilmore that what he described
| was very similar to the Multics referencing_dir mechanism. If it's
| done right, the application gets passed its _real_ absolute pathname,
| after all the symlinks have been chased.
| 
| While I'm here, I might as well lobby for support for a library
| function/system call which canonicalizes a pathname, chasing all the
| links and turning it into an absolute pathname.  abs_path(".", buf) should
| be equivalent to getwd(buf).  It was useful on Multics.  It would be
| very useful in some cases on UNIX.
|...
| 				Bill Sommerfeld
| 				wesommer at athena.mit.edu

I have a copy of a program called "name" which appears to do just
that (the O(n**2) variant), whose origin is unknown.  Would the
author care to (re)post it?  Shall I?
-- 
 David Collier-Brown.  {mnetor yunexus utgpu}!geac!daveb
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