Shell Programming and Scripting

So a script can tell where it's located by the $0 variable right? OK

So what if another script calls "require" on it? Does calling $0 still refer to where it's located? Apparently not, it refers to the script that called require on it. So when that required script tries to call require on other scripts using relative paths, those requires fail if the requiring script is not found in the same directory.

Is there a way to fix this? Thanks

---------- Post updated at 03:03 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:26 PM ----------

Nevermind it looks like __FILE__ fixes my problem.

Yes: never ever use relative paths in a script. That is an absolute no-no. This is not only true for perl but any language.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Relative paths are nice when you want to be able to move bundles of files around and still have them work though.

Also nice when you want to create development instances of piece of code by for instance, putting it in CVS, checking it out somewhere else and still have it function fine.

You don't use relative paths even then. Use a "master path" to which you add parts to maintain a certain sub-tree. You can change the "master path" to change tree locations.

Example:

Code:

mypath="/some/where"
logpath="$mypath/log"
cfgpath="$mypath/etc"
xxxpath="$mypath/somewhere/else"

etc.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Yes but if you have more than one file all these files have to use this master path. You have to change it in each of these files one at a time. You only have a single point of edit if it's one file. I'd rather not even have any points of edit when moving a bundle of files.

Or have them use the file with the master path in it, but again then we'd be using relative paths to accomplish that.

For files that apply to all instances of a program I'm not against using absolute paths though.