[kleff]

Never knew about readlink for files, but I use

  pwd -P 

all the time to get the real full path (no symlinks) of the current directory. Really easy to remember as well, Print Working Directory.

[kazgul]

That is not the same use case.

You could use this to get the current location of the script being run (not the location where it runs).

   readlink -f $0