Can I get the absolute path to the current script in KornShell?

Question

Is it possible to find out the full path to the script that is currently executing in KornShell (ksh)?

i.e. if my script is in /opt/scripts/myscript.ksh

Answer 1

readlink -f would be the best if it was portable, because it resolves every links found for both directories and files.

On mac os x there is no readlink -f (except maybe via macports), so you can only use readlink to get the destination of a specific symbolic link file.

The $(cd -P ... pwd -P) technique is nice but only works to resolve links for directories leading to the script, it doesn't work if the script itself is a symlink

Also, one case that wasn't mentioned : when you launch a script by passing it as an argument to a shell (/bin/sh /path/to/myscript.sh), $0 is not usable in this case

I took a look to mysql "binaries", many of them are actually shell scripts ; and now i understand why they ask for a --basedir option or need to be launched from a specific working directory ; this is because there is no good solution to locate the targeted script