How to find the residing directory of a OS X application package - programmatically

Question

I have a OS X application as a .app package which can reside in any arbitrary location in the filesystem. Is there a way to find the current path of the package programmatic

Answer 1

Building off the argv[0] version above, you can also get the path from:

    NSArray* arguments = [[NSProcessInfo processInfo] arguments];

    NSString* exe = [args objectAtIndex:0];

from init or applicationDidFinishLaunching

Answer 2

You should be able to find the location of the .app by [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundleURL]; or [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath];.

However, you probably want to access resources inside the .app by going through NSBundle to locate them in most cases (this deals with issues like localization).

Note: If you are planning to modify the application bundle; don't. You should not, can not and must not assume that you have write access to the application bundle; and if you do, something is likely very wrong.

Edit: As a point of interest, if you are writing a C program on OS X and need to find the location of the executable; you can use a non-portable main declaration like so:

int main (int argc, const char *argv[], const char *env[], const char *path[]) {
  // path[0] now contains the path to the executable
  // NOT PORTABLE! OS X ONLY!
  return 0;
}

Answer 3

The bundle directory might be a problem with command line tools. So i use the following function which uses the mach-0 linker function to resolve shared libraries.

 static char* find_executable_filepath () noexcept 
 {
     char path[1];
     uint32_t size = 1;
     if (_NSGetExecutablePath(path, &size) == 0) return nullptr;
     char* res = (char*)malloc(size+1);
     if (_NSGetExecutablePath(res, &size) != 0) return nullptr;
     char* r = realpath(res, nullptr);
     free(res);
     return r; 
 }