Perl: How File::Spec->canonpath($path) works

What is this method doing?

I simply don't understand it's purpose, and the explanation in perldoc is not helping me.

Now I need to update a Script that uses this method, so it would be good to understand what it is doing.

Is there a simple tutorial to understand the method?

A call to canonpath returns the canonical path that is equivalent to the passed parameter. That means it will

• Change all path separators to the platforms conventional path separator character

• Compress multiple path separators to a single one

• Remove trailing path separators

• Remove any superfluous . and .. path elements

This is best demonstrated with a Windows path like

C:/a/b/../c///d/.//

This Perl code

use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';

use File::Spec;

say File::Spec->canonpath('C:/a/b/../c///d/.//');

output

C:\a\c\d

Unfortunately I can't explain the code you show

my $dir  = File::Spec->curdir();
my $path = File::Spec->canonpath($dir);

because the curdir method returns . on Windows and Linux systems, and canonpath leaves this unchanged. If you wanted to discover the absolute path to the current directory then you would use

my $path = File::Spec->rel2abs(File::Spec->curdir());

However this is better done with the Cwd module like this

use Cwd ();

my $path = Cwd::cwd;