Source: turnoff.us

Cookbook

Find the directory of the running script

__DIR__=$(cd "$(dirname "$0")" && pwd)

dirname "$0" gives the script’s directory and cd ... && pwd turns it into an absolute path. Quote the inner command substitution: without the quotes, a path containing spaces is split into several arguments and cd fails with “too many arguments”. The && makes the script stop instead of falling back to a wrong directory if the cd fails.

Date aliases

alias isodate='date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z'

Prints the current time in ISO 8601 with the timezone offset, for example 2026-06-15T08:14:27+0200.