http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=661096

RoUS has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

How can I determine the full absolute filesystem path to the current file? Specifically, I have a module that needs to know its path in order to access another file in the same location. __FILE__ is giving me a relative path, somtimes funky, and I'm not sure to what it thinks it's relative..

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Re: Full path to the current file?
by davidrw (Prior) on Jan 08, 2008 at 14:59 UTC
[reply]
[d/l]
      Hi, ++davidrw
      or even 
      $ perl -MFile::Spec -le 'print File::Spec->rel2abs( __FILE__ ) ;'
/home/svenXY/-e    # for a one-liner

      [download]

      File::Basename is not necessary here.
      Regards,
      svenXY
[reply]
[d/l]
        OP said I have a module that needs to know its path in order to access another file in the same location. -- the second step of File::Basename is to fulfill that requirement (even though he didn't directly ask for it).


        Other shell (bash) solutions: 
        # setup
cd /var/tmp/
touch foo
f='../../var/tmp/foo'

# for just the directory:
d=`(cd ${f%/*} && pwd)`
#or:
d=`dirname $f`
d=`cd $d && pwd`

# for the filename (rel2abs):
d=`dirname $f`
d=`cd $d && pwd`
f=`basename $f`
f=`/bin/ls $d/$f`

        [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

      This works; thanks! The 'funky' aspect to which I referred is that when invoked from a script, the module's __FILE__ is 'XML/Foo.pm'. When invoked from the command line: 

      perl -e "use XML::Foo; $x = new XML::Foo;'

      its __FILE__ is reported as '/XML/Foo.pm' -- which is clearly bogus.

      It has been suggested that the latter behaviour is due to Red Hat's patches for Fedora Core 8.

      Whatever, you've given me the solution. I guess I'll just have to wait and see if it works in all cases, or if there are edge conditions where it goes blooey.

      Thanks!

[reply]
Re: Full path to the current file?
by cdarke (Prior) on Jan 08, 2008 at 20:30 UTC
    If you want the full path name of where a module was loaded from, use %INC. For example:
    use File::Basename;
print "$INC{'File/Basename.pm'}\n";

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: Full path to the current file?
by cLive ;-) (Prior) on Jan 08, 2008 at 16:11 UTC
    I have a feeling the proposed solutions above don't give you the path relative to the module, but to the script. Cwd is the simplest solution though: 
    #!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Cwd qw(abs_path getcwd);

print "This script is: ".abs_path($0)."\n";
print "Working dir is: ".getcwd()."\n";

    [download]

    but that won't tell you the path from the actual module.

    For that, you'll need to hard code the path to the module (I think):

    my $abs_filepath = abs_path("$module_dir/$relative_pilepath");

    [download]
     __FILENAME__ is your friend...
[reply]
[d/l]
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