Here’s what I’ve come up with (edit: plus some tweaks provided by sfstewman, levigroker, Kyle Strand, and Rob Kennedy), that seems to mostly fit my “better” criteria:
SCRIPTPATH="$( cd -- "$(dirname "$0")" >/dev/null 2>&1 ; pwd -P )"
That SCRIPTPATH
line seems particularly roundabout, but we need it rather than SCRIPTPATH=`pwd`
in order to properly handle spaces and symlinks.
The inclusion of output redirection (>/dev/null 2>&1
) handles the rare(?) case where cd
might produce output that would interfere with the surrounding $( ... )
capture. (Such as cd
being overridden to also ls
a directory after switching to it.)
Note also that esoteric situations, such as executing a script that isn’t coming from a file in an accessible file system at all (which is perfectly possible), is not catered to there (or in any of the other answers I’ve seen).
The --
after cd
and before "$0"
are in case the directory starts with a -
.