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pathlib.Path.absolute() mishandles drive-relative Windows paths #100809
Description
Windows has one current directory per drive, and supports drive-relative paths like 'X:' and 'X:foo.txt'. This makes a conversion from relative to absolute paths more complicated than simply prepending a (single) current directory.
It's correctly handled in ntpath.abspath() by calling NT's GetFullPathNameW() function. But in pathlib we simply prepend os.getcwd(), leading to incorrect results:
>>> import os, nt, pathlib
>>> os.chdir('Z:/build')
>>> os.chdir('C:/')
>>> os.path.abspath('Z:')
'Z:\\build'
>>> nt._getfullpathname('Z:')
'Z:\\build'
>>> pathlib.Path('Z:').absolute()
WindowsPath('Z:')This bug is present in all versions of CPython pathlib. We can't fix it by calling abspath() because it will also normalize the path, eliding '..' parts.
Activity
pythongh-100809: Fix handling of drive-relative paths in pathlib.Path…
Merge branch 'main' into pythongh-100809-path-absolute-nt
gh-100809: Fix handling of drive-relative paths in pathlib.Path.absol…
[3.11] pythongh-100809: Fix handling of drive-relative paths in pathl…
barneygale commentedon Feb 20, 2023
Fixed in #100812 (3.12), not backported due to interactions with other recent pathlib work.