Bash: Get current script name and absolute paths

9 Responses

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1. nanocell says

   you could just use the “basename” utility to get the filename, e..g
   basename /foo/bar/test.txt
   returns:
   test.txt

   November 24, 2008, 9:54 am
2. jtanium says

   That’s what I’m doing to get the file name, here:

   _my_name=`basename $0`

   The real point is to get the absolute path of the directory containing the script.

   If you are familiar with Ruby, you can accomplish the same thing with File.dirname(__FILE__)

   December 4, 2008, 11:23 am
3. iongion says

   Are you sure this works, using this exactly like in your sample of centos 5.3

   April 21, 2009, 7:21 am
4. jtanium says

   Yeah, just to make sure:

   [jtanium@flobot ~]$ cat script_name.sh
   #!/usr/bin/env bash
   
   echo "           \\$0: $0"
   
   _my_name=`basename $0`
   if [ "`echo $0 | cut -c1`" = "/" ]; then
     _my_path=`dirname $0`
   else
     _my_path=`pwd`/`echo $0 | sed -e s/$_my_name//`
   fi
   
   echo "     Filename: $_my_name"
   echo "Absolute path: $_my_path"
   [jtanium@flobot ~]$ ./script_name.sh
              \./script_name.sh: ./script_name.sh
        Filename: script_name.sh
   Absolute path: /home/jtanium/./
   [jtanium@flobot ~]$
   

   It does make me wonder what the deal is the the first echo $0 thing is…

   April 24, 2009, 10:03 am
5. nicholas tung says

   “$0″ is the name of the script file. It’s not by default an absolute path.

   With respect, this is not a clean solution; readlink as in http://fritzthomas.com/open-source/linux/384-how-to-get-the-absolute-path-within-the-running-bash-script/ is much better. The style is also not very good and breaks with spaces (the link above does too; it’s not my example). Try (with outer quotes)
   “$(readlink -f “$0″)”
   “$(dirname “$(readlink -f “$0″)”)”

   Despite what it looks, the inside of $() seems to start some sort of new environment, so the quotes around the “$0″ behave like you’d expect them to.

   regards,
   Nicholas

   May 26, 2009, 12:55 am
6. jtanium says

   @nicholas,

   That’s pretty sweet. I’ve never seen that before, and I’ll definitely use it.

   Thanks.

   May 26, 2009, 7:28 am
7. Mindya Bizness says

   in bash you can also use the following to get the path of the script.

   BaseDir=$(dirname $(which ${0}))

   August 11, 2009, 3:06 pm
8. jtanium says

   Bear in mind, that is only going to work if the script is in your path. Me, I’m not going to trust that.

   August 11, 2009, 7:35 pm
9. ishi says

   Speaking of bash, you could do it like this:

   pushd $(dirnamr $0) > /dev/null
   my_path=$(pwd)
   popd > /dev/null > /dev/null

   You could do much the same with cd (and cd -), but I don’t remember if ‘cd -’ is any more portable than pushd. Much the same with just remembering the ‘old pwd’.

   It has a very nice feature of removing junk from the file name, like when you call your script with something like

   ../../one/dir/../../..///another/dir/../../../../usr/bin/script.sh

   which might result from strange path concatenation (it *does* happen).

   Before you ‘scream’, yes, I know, this method assumes, that the executor has +x for the directory containing the script. Oh well.. Show me any sane person, who removes x from directories, but permits execution scripts therein

   September 16, 2009, 3:17 am