[Baypiggies] Locating the directory you are executing from

[Kelly Yancey]

Shannon -jj Behrens wrote:
> On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 1:15 PM, Aahz <aahz at pythoncraft.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, May 04, 2008, Jeff Younker wrote:
>>  >
>>  > I have a set of development scripts.  The scripts can potentially
>>  > be executed from many places.  They reference information which is
>>  > relative to their installation paths.  (These are build scripts.)
>>  >
>>  > The CI system can supply a fixed root, but when run by the developers
>>  > I'd like them to be runnable from anywhere in the project, and still
>>  > have them work.
>>
>>  If you're willing to require that the script directory NOT be on the
>>  path, just do some manipulation of sys.argv[0].  Otherwise, __file__ is
>>  the right approach.
> 
> Heh, I have this same problem ;)
> 
> -jj
> 

   Here is the snippet I've been using.  It supports running both as a 
python script and as a binary created by py2exe.  It also works on 
systems that return paths encoded with with non-ASCII character sets 
(e.g. non-U.S. version of Windows).

     import locale
     import os
     import sys

     if hasattr(sys, 'frozen'):
         # Running as executable generated by py2exe.
         runpath = sys.executable
     else:
         # Running as python script.
         runpath = sys.argv[0]
     rundir = os.path.dirname(unicode(runpath,
                                      locale.getpreferredencoding()))

   I am curious though: how is extracting the path from __file__ better 
than extracting it from sys.argv[0]?  The best I can tell (from simple 
test scripts) is that both yield the same results.

   Kelly

-- 
Kelly Yancey
http://kbyanc.blogspot.com/