What is a cross-platform way to get the current directory?

Question

I need a cross-platform way to get the current working directory (yes, getcwd does what I want). I thought this might do the trick:

#ifdef _WIN32
    #includ         


        

Answer 1

Calling getcwd with a NULL pointer is implementation defined. It often does the allocation for you with malloc (in which case your code does have a memory leak). However, it isn't guaranteed to work at all. So you should allocate your own buffer.

char *cwd_buffer = malloc(sizeof(char) * max_path_len);
char *cwd_result = getcwd(cwd_buffer, max_path_len);

The Open Group has an example showing how to get the max path length from _PC_PATH_MAX. You could consider using MAX_PATH on Windows. See this question for caveats to this number on both platforms.