Question

I know this question has been asked before but I still haven’t seen a satisfactory answer, or a definitive “no, this cannot be done”, so I’ll ask again!

All I want to do is get the path to the currently running executable, either as an absolute path or relative to where the executable is invoked from, in a platform-independent fashion. I though boost::filesystem::initial_path was the answer to my troubles but that seems to only handle the ‘platform-independent’ part of the question – it still returns the path from which the application was invoked.

For a bit of background, this is a game using Ogre, which I’m trying to profile using Very Sleepy, which runs the target executable from its own directory, so of course on load the game finds no configuration files etc. and promptly crashes. I want to be able to pass it an absolute path to the configuration files, which I know will always live alongside the executable. The same goes for debugging in Visual Studio – I’d like to be able to run $(TargetPath) without having to set the working directory.

Answer 1

There is no cross platform way that I know.

For Linux: pass "/proc/self/exe" to std::filesystem::canonical or readlink.

Windows: pass NULL as the module handle to GetModuleFileName.