How to force relative that to be absolute in linux?

Question

I have a third-part software with external configuration that takes "path to file" as input parameter. Unfortunately, this software concatenates path given with some predefined path. For example, it expects 'data/images' as parameter and will use '/Users/someuser/work/source/data/images'. I want to specify and absolute path, but giving something like '/tmp/images' to this software will just result in unexisting path '/Users/someuser/work/source//tmp/images' being used :(. Is it some path trick i can use alongside of '..' so i can give software something that will result in absolute path after software concatenates it with predefined one. Using '..' works but it's not a very good solution since path configuration is static and predefined path software use can change.

Answer 1

There are myriads of possibilities to make /Users/someuser/work/source/XXX to point wherever you want to in Linux:

• Use symlinks - doing something like:

  ln -s /wherever/you/want /Users/someuser/work/source/XXX
  

  would make /Users/someuser/work/source/XXX to appear as a directory. If some software would travel there and/or write files there, they would end up in /wherever/you/want.

• Mount some other filesystem in XXX, i.e.

  mount /dev/something /Users/someuser/work/source/XXX
  

  This way you'll get your /dev/something device mounted right at the directory the application would write to.

• Do a "bind mount", i.e. rebind a part of some other filesystem (already mounted) to XXX:

  mount -o bind /wherever/you/want /Users/someuser/work/source/XXX
  

  It works much like a symlink, but it's much harder to detect by application. Application might easily check whether target directory is a symlink and refuse writing there, while bind mount method provides a normal directory, but it's contents would

• Use a unionfs-like filesystem, such as unionfs or aufs - this way you can "unify", i.e. mount simultaneously several filesystems in one directory (i.e. XXX)

• Play some tricks with LD_PRELOAD and libraries that override methods, such as open(), fopen(), etc - the most prominent one is fuse, namely, you might want to check out Union-like filesystems for FUSE.

Answer 2

If you symlink /Users/someuser/work/source/ to / (root)

work$ ln -s / source

Every path there will be based off the root:

/Users/someuser/work/source/tmp/images 

will point to

/tmp/images

which you can check by

work$ ls source/tmp/images