Shell Programming and Scripting

hi,

I tried whence $0, but that just gives me the filename relative to where I am executing the script from. I need to get the full pathname.

thanks

pwd won't work?

regarding whence, I guess "$0" depends on how you execute the script ( via absolute path or relative path )

try executing your script with absolute path and check.

eg.

Code:

/this/is/my/abs/path/script.ksh

pwd gives the location of where I am executing the script from.

My users can execute it from anywhere, so I cant force them to put the absolute path

thanks

you can run from anywhere of course.
just use absolute path while executing.

what i mean to say is this

Code:

-bash-3.1$ pwd
/a/b
-bash-3.1$ /this/is/my/abs/path/script.ksh
-bash-3.1$ cd ..
-bash-3.1$ pwd
/a
-bash-3.1$ /this/is/my/abs/path/script.ksh

I am not sure if this solve your problem. just a try.

hi,

use : which <your script>

this assumes that PATH has been exported
cheers

which wont work, because there will be many scripts with the same name in different locations and they will be executed using many different ways.

Surely there must be a way to execute a script from any location and get that script to output it's full path to stdout??

At least in bash, $0 includes the relative or absolute path, depending on what the user typed. If it is a relative path (first character is not "/"), you just prepend $PWD/.

Code:

#!/bin/bash
if [ "#{0:0:1}" = "/" ]; then
    spath=$0
else
    spath=$PWD/$0
fi
echo "Script is at $spath"

I don't know ksh so I cannot help you with the exact syntax for that.

For a relative path, you'll end up with "/./" in the middle of the path. It's ugly but legal. You can get rid of that with a little more work.