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

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

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

Thanks.

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

[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…

_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__)