Question

I am running my C# application from “D:\App\program.cs”. My application needs to execute a file placed in “C:\Program Files\software\abc.exe”.

How can I set the relative path in my program to execute the “abc.exe”?

Answer 1

To answer the question how to get a path that shows the relative location of pathB from pathA. You can use the Uri class to get the relative path.

string pathA = @"C:\App\program.cs";
string pathB = @"C:\program files\software\abc.exe";

System.Uri uriA = new Uri(pathA);
System.Uri uriB = new Uri(pathB);
Uri relativeUri = uriA.MakeRelativeUri(uriB);
string relativeToA = relativeUri.ToString();

Console.WriteLine(relativeToA);

This yields “../program%20files/software/abc.exe” for the relative path.

I have changed your example from D to C though because you can’t have a relative path for two locations on different drive letters, although the above code still works, just yields the absolute.

OR if the c# bit is a red herring, and as I now understand you want to run a batch file:

in batch file put:

cd c:\program files\software\
abc.exe

abc.exe will then execute from software folder and not folder of the batch file.