Question

How can I determine the name of the Bash script file inside the script itself?

Like if my script is in file runme.sh, then how would I make it to display ‘You are running runme.sh’ message without hardcoding that?

Answer 1

me=$(basename "$0") 

For reading through a symlink¹, which is usually not what you want (you usually don’t want to confuse the user this way), try:

me="$(basename "$(test -L "$0" && readlink "$0" || echo "$0")")" 

IMO, that’ll produce confusing output. "I ran foo.sh, but it’s saying I’m running bar.sh!? Must be a bug!" Besides, one of the purposes of having differently-named symlinks is to provide different functionality based on the name it’s called as (think gzip and gunzip on some platforms).

---

¹ That is, to resolve symlinks such that when the user executes foo.sh which is actually a symlink to bar.sh, you wish to use the resolved name bar.sh rather than foo.sh.