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Full Discussion: get the path of current running program
Top Forums Programming get the path of current running program Post 302288461 by otheus on Tuesday 17th of February 2009 09:35:41 AM
Old 02-17-2009
The call to getcwd() returns the path to the current directory. argv[0] contains the invocation of the current program, and can be used to infer the directory of the path to itself -- but not necessarily. If the program was invoked without any directory information and is invoked along the PATH variable, you can grab the PATH variable from the environ (getenv("PATH")) and traverse each element looking for the program itself (basename of argv[0]).

There's a function called realpath() which canonicalizes the pathname you provide to its argument. However, it's recommended NOT to use this in general, because you have to allocate memory for the return argument, but there's no way of knowing how large that memory allocation should be. (But realistically you can get away with 1k).

Unfortunately, realpath doesn't do any of the "real work" for you. You still have to traverse PATH to find the program's home directory.
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

shtool-path

SHTOOL-PATH.TMP(1)					      GNU Portable Shell Tool						SHTOOL-PATH.TMP(1)

NAME

       shtool-path - GNU shtool command dealing with shell path variables

SYNOPSIS

       shtool path [-s|--suppress] [-r|--reverse] [-d|--dirname] [-b|--basename] [-m|--magic] [-p|--path path] str [str ...]

DESCRIPTION

       This command deals with shell $PATH variables. It can find a program through one or more filenames given by one or more str arguments.  It
       prints the absolute filesystem path to the program displayed on "stdout" plus an exit code of 0 if it was really found.

OPTIONS

       The following command line options are available.

       -s, --suppress
	   Supress output. Useful to only test whether a program exists with the help of the return code.

       -r, --reverse
	   Transform a forward path to a subdirectory into a reverse path.

       -d, --dirname
	   Output the directory name of str.

       -b, --basename
	   Output the base name of str.

       -m, --magic
	   Enable advanced magic search for ""perl"" and ""cpp"".

       -p, --path path
	   Search in path. Default is to search in $PATH.

EXAMPLE

	#   shell script
	awk=`shtool path -p "${PATH}:." gawk nawk awk`
	perl=`shtool path -m perl`
	cpp=`shtool path -m cpp`
	revpath=`shtool path -r path/to/subdir`

HISTORY

       The GNU shtool path command was originally written by Ralf S.  Engelschall <rse@engelschall.com> in 1998 for Apache. It was later taken
       over into GNU shtool.

SEE ALSO

       shtool(1), which(1).

18-Jul-2008							   shtool 2.0.8 						SHTOOL-PATH.TMP(1)
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