Newline in realpath (and many other commands) output is mostly for aesthetics. It doesn't help with taming $(), because $() strips all trailing newlines, includ

Newline in realpath (and many other commands) output is mostly for aesthetics. It doesn't help with taming $(), because $() strips all trailing newlines, including the ones that were actually part of the pathname. You would have have to resort to something as ugly as: f=$(realpath ... && printf 'x') f=${f%x}