Bash – How to retrieve the absolute filename in a shell script on Mac OS X

bashmac-osxshell

I'd like to retrieve the absolute file name of the script file that's currently executed. Links should be resolved, too.

On Linux, this seems to be done like this:

$(readlink -mn "$0")

but readlink seems to work very differently on Mac OS X.

I've read that this is done using

$(realpath $0)

in BSD but that doesn't work, either. Mac OS X does not have realpath.

Any idea?

Best Answer

I cheat and use perl for this very thing:

#!/bin/bash
dirname=`perl -e 'use Cwd "abs_path";print abs_path(shift)' $0`
echo $dirname

You'd think I'd just write the entire script in perl, and often I do, but not always.

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