I have a setup.sh script that needs to be sourced, not executed. What can I use inside this script to determine the full path to itself, so I can compute some variables relative to it?

If it was always sourced in the same directory as it resides (not an option) I would of course use "$PWD". If it was being executed, I would use "$0". If it was a python script, I could also use __file__. Etc. But I can't think of a solution for the basic situation here.

Thanks in advance for any help.

How about putting

cmdline=`history 1`

at the start of the script? Then $cmdline gives the commandline for the source command.

Thanks for the help. I never thought of that, and I'm definitely going to use it in some of my scripts.

However, I hesitate to rely on it in production releases. That variable will be the whole command line, including any other commands composed with it using `;', and the very problem I'm having is causing people to do that very often (cd $location; source ./setup.sh; cd $OLDPWD).

Splitting on `;' would be easy enough, but there are lots of other shell metacharacters that could come into play. Though unlikely, the command could be used in conjunction with commands like time and watch, and environment variables are still sitting there unevaluated.

For example,

Even if I could write the code to determine that path to setup.sh in this case, I would not trust it in general.

Yes, I thought it was a bit kludgy, but it seemed like the file had already been closed by the time the commands started to execute, so in that sense the location of the file really was just 'history'.

I had another look at the man page for bash. Have you looked at the BASH_SOURCE variable? It seems to be giving what you want inside the script.

${BASH_SOURCE} should be just what you're asking for.

${BASH_SOURCE%/*} should give you the path you need.

${BASH_SOURCE##*/} would give just the actual name of the file, just in case you need to know the name it was called by.

BTW, what did you do/use?


Refs
In the bash man page, which is long & sometimes confusing, search for:

• BASH_SOURCE
• ${parameter#word}

Thanks a lot! BASH_SOURCE is exactly what I was looking for.

Unfortunately it seems to not be available before bash version 3, and I would like a solution for csh, too, but I can deal with those situations as special cases.

For the vast majority of users, problem solved.