Can I get the absolute path to the current script in KornShell?

Question

Is it possible to find out the full path to the script that is currently executing in KornShell (ksh)?

i.e. if my script is in /opt/scripts/myscript.ksh

Answer 1

How the script was called is stored in the variable $0. You can use readlink to get the absolute file name:

readlink -f "$0"

Answer 2

readlink -f would be the best if it was portable, because it resolves every links found for both directories and files.

On mac os x there is no readlink -f (except maybe via macports), so you can only use readlink to get the destination of a specific symbolic link file.

The $(cd -P ... pwd -P) technique is nice but only works to resolve links for directories leading to the script, it doesn't work if the script itself is a symlink

Also, one case that wasn't mentioned : when you launch a script by passing it as an argument to a shell (/bin/sh /path/to/myscript.sh), $0 is not usable in this case

I took a look to mysql "binaries", many of them are actually shell scripts ; and now i understand why they ask for a --basedir option or need to be launched from a specific working directory ; this is because there is no good solution to locate the targeted script

Answer 3

The variable $RPATH contains the relative path to the real file or the real path for a real file.

CURPATH=$( cd -P -- "$(dirname -- "$(command -v -- "$0")")" && pwd -P )

CURLOC=$CURPATH/`basename $0`

if [ `ls -dl $CURLOC |grep -c "^l" 2>/dev/null` -ne 0 ];then

    ROFFSET=`ls -ld $CURLOC|cut -d ">" -f2 2>/dev/null`

    RPATH=`ls -ld $CURLOC/$ROFFSET 2>/dev/null`

else

    RPATH=$CURLOC

fi

echo $RPATH

Answer 4

Try which command.

which scriptname

will give you the full qualified name of the script along with its absolute path

Answer 5

I upgraded the Edward Staudt's answer, to be able to deal with absolute-path symbolic links, and with chains of links too.

DZERO=$0
while true; do
  echo "Trying to find real dir for script $DZERO"
  CPATH=$( cd -P -- "$(dirname -- "$(command -v -- "$DZERO")")" && pwd -P )
  CFILE=$CPATH/`basename $DZERO`
  if [ `ls -dl $CFILE | grep -c "^l" 2>/dev/null` -eq 0 ];then
    break
  fi
  LNKTO=`ls -ld $CFILE | cut -d ">" -f2 | tr -d " " 2>/dev/null`
  DZERO=`cd $CPATH ; command -v $LNKTO`
done

Ugly, but works... After run this, the path is $CPATH and the file is $CFILE

Answer 6

This is what I did:

if [[ $0 != "/"* ]]; then
  DIR=`pwd`/`dirname $0`
else
  DIR=`dirname $0`
fi