C++ fopen relative Path

Question

I read through some topic about relative path, but i still got i wrong. I hope sb can help me :). I am using Visual studio 2013, windows 7

I got the following directories:

Here is my .exe file D:\uni\c++\ex5\msvc2013\ex5\Debug

Here is the file i want to read D:\uni\c++\ex5\res\thehead.raw

The code for opening the file:

FILE* f;
f = fopen("..\\..\\..\\res\\thehead.raw", "rb");
if (f == NULL)
printf("FAIL!!");

As i need to use relative paths i figured it out as following: ..\ gets to parent directory.

so "..\..\..\" should get me into the folder "D:\uni\c++\ex5\".

\res should open the res foulder.

Needless to say it fails and i have no idea why. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Relative paths are relative to the current working directory, not the path of the executable. The current working directory is the directory from which you started the program.

To treat a path as relative to the position of the executable, the simplest portable option is to access the executable as argv[0], extract the directory, and chdir() into it. Note that this will work only as long as the program was itself started with the full path name.