where my executable is

where my executable is

[Anni Hienola]

Is there a function that would give the absolute path to the directory
where my executable was executed from?

I've been searching the documentations and tutorials throughout the web
for this, without any success. It sounds so trivial that I wonder, why
it so hard to get.


Anni Hienola

Re: where my executable is

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Sep 24, 2001, Anni Hienola <Anni.Hienola@helsinki.fi> wrote:

> Is there a function that would give the absolute path to the directory
> where my executable was executed from?

Not in GCC, since it is just a compiler.  It doesn't include a C
library, it just uses the one that comes with whatever OS you're
running.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me

Re: where my executable is

[Michael Veksler]

> Is there a function that would give the absolute path to the directory
> where my executable was executed from?

If your main looks like: int main(int argc, char *argv[])
Then you normally can use argv[0] (no guarantee).

Here is pseudocode (I do something similar in ksh):

// Finds the full path version of "dir"
char* resolve_dir(char *dir)
{
   if (dir starts with '/'):
      return dir
   else:
     return getcwd()+'/'+dir
}

if (argv[0] contains '/'):
   return resolve_dir(the directory part of argv[0]);


// Search through $PATH;
name=argv[0]; // note that name contains no '/'
foreach element in $PATH:
   if exists executable file element+'/'+name:
      return resolve_dir(element+'/'+name);

// Nothing found
error "can't find the directory, the caller did not pass relevant info"