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Asked: 2026-05-27T14:40:01+00:00

I have a Ruby script with path /foo/bar/gazook/script.rb . I also created a symlink

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I have a Ruby script with path /foo/bar/gazook/script.rb. I also created a symlink to it in $HOME/bin.

Now, I want my Ruby script to access some other file in directory /foo, and to keep paths relative, I have a variable FOO_DIRECTORY = File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../../") in my script.

The problem is that if I run my script from its symlink, this relative directory is wrong (since I guess its expanding from a different location).

How do I fix this? Is there a way besides using an absolute path?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can use File.readlink to resolve a symlink but you’ll want to check File.symlink? first.

    path = File.symlink?(__FILE__) ? File.readlink(__FILE__) : __FILE__

    Then you can work with path instead of __FILE__. You might want to use $0 instead of __FILE__ as well, __FILE__ is the current filename whereas $0 is the name of the current script.

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