It is a portable version of the realpath(1) utility that you can find on
Mac OS X and FreeBSD (see also The Open Group Base Specifications Issue
6, IEEE Std 1003.1).

Without the -P flag, pwd(1) might return different values when the
current path contains one or more symlinks, depending on how you got
into the current directory.

In simplenode.runner, this may cause PIPE_DIR to have different values
on each use, which will make it impossible to connect to the running
node unless you guess the correct path yourself.

To support OTP release upgrades I have added support for building
upgrade packages. Support for this is included in the
rebar_upgrade module, specifically generate_upgrade/2. It requires
one variable to be set on the command line 'previous_release' which
is the absolute path or relative path from 'rel/' to the previous
release one is upgrading from. Running an upgrade will create the
needed files, including a relup and result in a tarball containing
the upgrade being written to 'rel/'. When done it cleans up the
temporary files systools created.

Usage:
$ rebar generate-upgrade previous_release=/path/to/old/version

This also includes a dummy application that can be used to test
upgrades as well as an example.

Special thanks to Daniel Reverri, Jesper Louis Andersen and
Richard Jones for comments and patches.