is there a way to get path and name of the interpreter that is running current script?

Question

I mean the situation when lua is run not as embedded in another app but as standalone scripting language.

I need something like PHP_BINARY or sys.executable in python. Is that possible with LUA ?

Answer 1

Note that the the solution given by lhf is not the most general. If the interpreter has been called with additional command line parameters (if this may be your case) you will have to search arg.

In general the interpreter name is stored at the most negative integer index defined for arg. See this test script:

local i_min = 0
while arg[ i_min ] do i_min = i_min - 1 end
i_min = i_min + 1   -- so that i_min is the lowest int index for which arg is not nil

for i = i_min, #arg do
    print( string.format( "arg[%d] = %s", i, arg[ i ] ) )
end