Finding current executable’s path without /proc/self/exe

by

Some OS-specific interfaces:

There are also third party libraries that can be used to get this information, such as whereami as mentioned in prideout’s answer, or if you are using Qt, QCoreApplication::applicationFilePath() as mentioned in the comments.

The portable (but less reliable) method is to use argv[0]. Although it could be set to anything by the calling program, by convention it is set to either a path name of the executable or a name that was found using $PATH.

Some shells, including bash and ksh, set the environment variable “_“ to the full path of the executable before it is executed. In that case you can use getenv("_") to get it. However this is unreliable because not all shells do this, and it could be set to anything or be left over from a parent process which did not change it before executing your program.

More Related Contents:

  1. How to disassemble a binary executable in Linux to get the assembly code?
  2. Is a Linux executable “compatible” with OS X?
  3. How to implement readlink to find the path
  4. Default libraries linked in by gcc?
  5. On OS X, simple C++ program gives incorrect results (which are a result of command-line options ‘c++03’ vs ‘c++11’)
  6. How can I profile C++ code running on Linux?
  7. What are the GCC default include directories?
  8. VS Code will not build c++ programs with multiple .ccp source files
  9. High resolution timer with C++ and Linux?
  10. Are child processes created with fork() automatically killed when the parent is killed?
  11. Linking a shared library with another shared lib in linux
  12. Issuing system commands in Linux from C, C++
  13. will casting around sockaddr_storage and sockaddr_in break strict aliasing
  14. Spinlock versus Semaphore
  15. OSX – replace gcc version 4.2.1 with 4.9 installed via Homebrew
  16. Proper way to create unique_ptr that holds an allocated array
  17. How to print pthread_t
  18. Netbeans 7.2 shows “Unable to resolve identifier” , although build is successful
  19. How to pause a pthread ANY TIME I want?
  20. Rewinding std::cout to go back to the beginning of a line
  21. How to set breakpoints on future shared libraries with a command flag
  22. How to enable core dump in my Linux C++ program [duplicate]
  23. Simple Linux Signal Handling
  24. Is there a limit of stack size of a process in linux
  25. How to create a temporary directory in C++?
  26. Get home directory in Linux
  27. /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6: version CXXABI_1.3.8′ not found
  28. Clearing terminal in Linux with C++ code
  29. _GNU_SOURCE and __USE_GNU
  30. Why does the free() function not return memory to the operating system?

Leave a Comment