How do I get the directory that a program is running from?

Question

Is there a platform-agnostic and filesystem-agnostic method to obtain the full path of the directory from where a program is running using C/C++? Not to be confused with the

Answer 1

Boost Filesystem's initial_path() behaves like POSIX's getcwd(), and neither does what you want by itself, but appending argv[0] to either of them should do it.

You may note that the result is not always pretty--you may get things like /foo/bar/../../baz/a.out or /foo/bar//baz/a.out, but I believe that it always results in a valid path which names the executable (note that consecutive slashes in a path are collapsed to one).

I previously wrote a solution using envp (the third argument to main() which worked on Linux but didn't seem workable on Windows, so I'm essentially recommending the same solution as someone else did previously, but with the additional explanation of why it is actually correct even if the results are not pretty.