How to dot-dot from non-existent directory in Linux (dir1/non-existent-dir/./file)

Question

Is there any way to dot-dot cd/ls/whatever if the path has an non-existent directory in it? Maybe there is some syntax to do so?

Eg I need to cat the file valid_dir/file.txt but for some reason I can't to it directly.

$> cat valid_dir/non-existent-dir/../file.txt

Answer 1

In GNU Coreutils, there is realpath to print resolved absolute filenames:

cat "$(realpath -m valid_dir/non-existent-dir/../file.txt)"

The -m ( --canonicalize-missing ) option is required if there are non-existing components.

If you want relative paths instead, you can define the directory they should be relative to with --relative-to , for example the current directory:

$ realpath --relative-to=. -m valid_dir/non-existent-dir/../file.txt
valid_dir/file.txt