How to retrieve the path where the running script is located?

Short answer¶

In your script, define the $__PATH__ variable as follow:

__PATH__=$(cd $(dirname "$0"); pwd)

Details¶

This solution is pretty complicated and expensive (spawns two subshells), but all other attempts I made got tricked by edge cases.

Some traps:

• You have to avoid . and .. entries that can occur in $0
• You need to abstract the fact the path can contain symbolic links.
• You must be as cross-platform as possible (readlink was a candidate to solve this, but for example, OSX and GNU implementations have very different syntaxes).

Links & references¶

• Wiki: Bash & Shell