How to expand relative paths in shell script

Question

I am writing a script to set environment variables on linux 2.6 using bash. So the script contains commands like:

export SRC_DIR=..
export LIBPATH=${SRC_DIR}/lib         


        

Answer 1

Do this instead:

export SRC_DIR=`pwd`;

Update:

Since you want path relative to the script's location on the filesystem, use this instead:

export SRC_DIR=`dirname $0`

Update2:

Your script must be invoked directly and not as bash /path/to/script.sh or source foo.sh. Add a shebang line, add execute permissions and invoke the script directly.