Question

I have a C program that uses some resources located in the same directory as the executable. When I execute the program from a random working directory (not the directory where the program is located) the resources don’t load, because the relative path I use in the code is not the path where the executable is. How can I solve this nicely?

Answer 1

Pass the path of the directory that contains the resources to the program as an argument and either:

• change the current directory of the process to the directory (chdir() on Unix and SetCurrentDirectory() on Windows), or
• construct absolute paths to the resources

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If it is Windows, as the comment on the question suggests, you can obtain the path of the exe using GetModuleFileName(), extract the directory from it and avoid having to provide an argument to the program. Then either of two options listed would allow the program to be executed from anywhere and still locate its resources.