How to get the realpath of a symbolic link?

[Emile van Sebille]

On 10/31/2009 10:11 AM Peng Yu said...
 >
 > My definition of 'realpath' is different from the definition of
 > 'os.path.realpath'. But I'm not short what term I should use to
 > describe. I use the following example to show what I want.
 >
 > In my example in the original post,
 >
 > '/tmp/abspath/b' is a symbolic link to '/tmp/abspath/a' and '/tmp' is
 > a symbolic link to '/private/tmp'.
 >
 > Therefore, I want to get '/private/tmp/abspath/b', rather than
 > '/private/tmp/abspath/a', as the canonical path of 'b'.
 >

It still looks like it works here.  I've set up a similar structure and 
appear to get the results you're asking for using os.path.realpath.

# pwd
/home/emile
# ls -l
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2009-10-31 10:25 private
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   11 2009-10-31 10:25 tmp -> private/tmp

# pwd
/home/emile/tmp/abspath
# ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10 2009-10-31 10:25 a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  1 2009-10-31 10:26 b -> a

Python 2.6.3 (r263:75183, Oct 15 2009, 15:03:49) [GCC 4.3.2] on linux2
 >>> import os
 >>> os.path.realpath('/home/emile/tmp/a')
'/home/emile/private/tmp/a'
 >>> os.path.realpath('/home/emile/tmp/b')
'/home/emile/private/tmp/b'

> If the argument is a symbolic link os.path.realpath will return the
> actually target of the symbolic link. 
> However, I want the path of the
> symbolic link rather than the path of the target.

Which is what I got above.

> 
> Hope this is clear.