When writing a bash script, how do I get the absolute path of the location of the current file?

Suppose I have a bash file called myBash.bash. It resides in:

/myDirect/myFolder/myBash.bash

Now I want to use the string /myDirect/myFolder (the location of myBash.bash) inside the script. Is there a command I can use to find this location?

Edit: The idea is that I want to set-up a zip-folder with code that can be started by a bash script inside that zip-file. I know the relative file-paths of the code inside that zip-file, but not the absolute paths, and I need those. One way would be to hard-code in the path, or require the path of the file to be given as a variable. However I would find it easier if it was possible for the bash-file to figure out where it is on its own and then create the relevant paths to the other file from its knowledge of the structure of the zip-file.

9

4 Answers

You can get the full path like:

realpath "$0"

And as pointed out by Serg you can use dirname to strip the filename like this

dirname "$(realpath $0)"

or even better to prevent awkward quoting and word-splitting with difficult filenames:

temp=$( realpath "$0" ) && dirname "$temp"

Much better than my earlier idea which was to parse it (I knew there would be a better way!)

realpath "$0" | sed 's|\(.*\)/.*|\1|'

Notes

• realpath returns the actual path of a file
• $0 is this file (the script)
• s|old|new| replace old with new
• \(.*\)/ save any characters before / for later
• \1 the saved part

6

The accepted answer seems perfect. Here's another way to do it:

cd "$(dirname "$0")"
/bin/pwd

/bin/pwd prints the real path of the directory, as opposed to the pwd builtin command.

if the script is in your path you can use something like

$ myloc=$(dirname "$(which foo.sh)")
$ echo "$myloc"
/path/to/foo.sh

EDIT: after reading comments from Serg, this might be a generic solution which works whether the script is in your path or not.

myloc==$(dirname "$(realpath $0)")
dirname "$myloc"

1

wdir="$PWD"; [ "$PWD" = "/" ] && wdir=""
case "$0" in /*) scriptdir="${0}";; *) scriptdir="$wdir/${0#./}";;
esac
scriptdir="${scriptdir%/*}"
echo "$scriptdir"

It is taken as reference from kenorb and andro
No dirname, readlink, realpath, BASH_SOURCE
All are builtins

2

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