[net.general] Full Path Name Printer?

padpowell@wateng.UUCP (PAD Powell [Admin]) (11/23/83)

I am looking for a program or function that will generate the full
path name of a file.
It should remove all of the ~, ., and .. references in the file name.
I have seen this used in some programs,  but have not been impressed with
some of the techniques used.  The calling sequence of the function should
be:
int full_path( src, dest, max_dest_len )
	char *src, /*source string containing file name */
	char *dest; /*destination string for full path name */
	int max_dest_len; /* size of dest string */
returns: the length of the full path name, or 0 if the dest string
	size is exceeded.  The dest string should be 0 terminated.

If there is a program, then I would invoke the thing using the POPEN
facility of the STDIO package, and pass it a set of strings.
This thing should run unbuffered, so that I get the strings back.
I would like to have this work under 4.1 and 4.2 if possible.  I thought
there was a shell command to do this,  but it does not seem to optimize.

Patrick Powell,
VLSI Research Group, U. Waterloo, Waterloo, Ont.