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What I'd like to do is to include settings from a file into my current interactive bash shell like this:
$ . /path/to/some/dir/.settings
The problem is that the .settings script also needs to use the "." operator to include other files like this:
. .extra_settings
How do I reference the relative path for .extra_settings in the .settings file? These two files are always stored in the same directory, but the path to this directory will be different depending on where these files were installed.
The operator always knows the /path/to/some/dir/ as shown above. How can the .settings file know the directory where it is installed? I would rather not have an install process that records the name of the installed directory.
467
There may be times when you need to know the actual location a BASH script is located within the script. This can be done with a combination of the $0 value and the dirname command.
You can use $BASH_SOURCE : #!/usr/bin/env bash scriptdir="$( dirname -- "$BASH_SOURCE"; )"; Note that you need to use #!/bin/bash and not #!/bin/sh since it's a Bash extension.
The source command reads and executes commands from the file specified as its argument in the current shell environment. It is useful to load functions, variables, and configuration files into shell scripts.
Check if directory exists in Bash scriptDIR=/tmp/downloads [ -d "$DIR" ] && echo "$DIR directory exists." A command line one-liner would look like this: $ DIR=/tmp/downloads; [ -d "$DIR" ] && echo "$DIR directory exists." OR $ [ -d /tmp/downloads ] && echo "the directory exists."
I believe $(dirname "$BASH_SOURCE") will do what you want, as long as the file you are sourcing is not a symlink.
If the file you are sourcing may be a symlink, you can do something like the following to get the true directory:
PRG="$BASH_SOURCE"
progname=`basename "$BASH_SOURCE"`
while [ -h "$PRG" ] ; do
ls=`ls -ld "$PRG"`
link=`expr "$ls" : '.*-> \(.*\)$'`
if expr "$link" : '/.*' > /dev/null; then
PRG="$link"
else
PRG=`dirname "$PRG"`"/$link"
fi
done
dir=$(dirname "$PRG")
We found $(dirname "$(realpath "$0")") to be the most reliable with both sh and bash. As team mates used them interchangeably, we ran into problems with $BASH_SOURCE which is not supported by sh.
Instead, we now rely on dirname, which can also be stacked to get parent, or grandparent folders.
The following example returns the parent dir of the folder that contains the .sh file:
parent_path=$(dirname "$(dirname "$(realpath "$0")")")
echo $parent_path
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