Shell Programming and Scripting

When you run a script, how will you know the directory for the actual file that contains the script. The code should be like .Me in VB. I dont know how we do it in unix. Is it possible?

Maybe this is too simplistic of an answer but wouldn't "pwd" get you what you want?

There are several things you could try.
Usually the special variable $0 contains the name of the process,
or in your case of the shell script.
Chances are that your script was started by specifying the absolute path,
at least this is common for cronjob launched scripts.
Then you could extract the dirname by simply

PATH2SCRIPT=$(dirname $0)

You could also try to retreive it from the proc table like

PATH2SCRIPT=$(dirname $(ps -C name_of_script -o args=|awk '{print$2}'))

If your OS is Linux you could as well look up the command line of your script
in the proc virtual filesystem, remembering that the special shell variable $$
refers to your script's PID, like

PATH2SCRIPT=$(dirname $(cat /proc/$$/cmdline))

But this all seems redundant to me,
or I simply haven't understood your objective.

actually my objective is to have the scripts which are portble. the is usully a case in which you will deploy various scripts to various user. thus your directory will depend on the user.

I will then have a directory which I will call "main". this directory will become portable where the "main script" is located. inside this directory are various subfolders which contains scripts. These scripts will be called by the "main script".

Use the variable PWD which holds the current directory information of the cd command only in ksh

Something very similiar to how to find Script file location inside script

Hello, I think you can use the find command in the script to get the path of the file residing



regards,
deepshree