Hi Markus,

Unfortunately GNU/Linux doesn't agree with the rest of the world  
about the flags (including -f) understood by readlink (and Solaris  
doesn't have it at all) so your suggestion isn't going to work.

How about this instead?

readlink="`which readlink`"
test -x "${readlink}" || readlink=echo

canonic () {(
     cd  "`dirname     \"$1\"`"
     dir="`basename    \"$1\"`"
     cd  "`${readlink} \"${dir}\"`"
     pwd
)}

bindir="`dirname \"$0\"`"
bindir="`canonic \"${bindir}\"`"
prefix="`dirname \"${bindir}\"`"
[...rest of file the same...]

Cheers,
Ian