Question

I’m not understanding this behavior. Maybe someone can explain to me why my current working directory is not what I expect.

On my desktop, I have a folder called STKGui:

C:\Documents and Settings\Lauren\Desktop\STKGui

Located in that directory are the following files: gui.html, style.css, save.html, load.html Within STKGui there are also the following directories: Images, Scripts, and SaveData. Scripts contains various .vbs files, including gui.vbs.

I start with gui.html. I click a button which takes me to load.html. load.html uses scripts from Scripts\gui.vbs. One of the functions loads a database, and to do so I provide the location of the database: C:\Documents and Settings\Lauren\Desktop\STKGui\SaveData\SaveData.accdb Of course I want to use a relative file path instead of a fixed path. My initial attempt to load the database failed; it was trying to load from C:\Documents and Settings\Lauren\Desktop\SaveData\SaveData.accdb. So to troubleshoot I printed out the current working directory; much to my chagrin it was C:\Documents and Settings\Lauren\Desktop

I don’t understand why my desktop is my current working directory. Shouldn’t it be where the file is running from? I figured it would be either C:\Documents and Settings\Lauren\Desktop\STKGui (the location of load.html) OR C:\Documents and Settings\Lauren\Desktop\STKGui\Scripts (the location of gui.vbs which contains the function that’s trying to load the database/printing debug messages of the current working directory).

Can someone explain why the current working directory is what it is, or better yet tell me how to get what I really want, which is the location of the files executing? (I don’t care if it’s the main STKGui folder or the scripts folder–as long as it’s within the application’s directory structure I can work with it!)

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EDIT (7/14/10 4:02 pm EDT):

Various attempts at printing the current working directory or grabbing files based on what I -thought- was the relative path from my executing script have resulted in my desktop’s path instead of the path of the executed script. I stumbled across this link: http://leereid.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/vbscript-current-directory-or-folder/ but none of the solutions are working for me, as I get run-time errors regarding the Wscript object. So while I don’t know if any of the solutions on the aforementioned link will produce different results, if someone can help me get at least one of them working so I can find out that may be a step in the right direction.

One of the solutions, reproduced below:

Set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set ofso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
oShell.CurrentDirectory = ofso.GetParentFolderName(Wscript.ScriptFullName)

produces the following error:

Object required: ‘Wscript’ line: 659 char: 1

with line 659 being:

oShell.CurrentDirectory = ofso.GetParentFolderName(Wscript.ScriptFullName)

Answer 1

This solution was NOT ideal, but what I ended up doing was parsing the url in my browser to get the directory.

guiPath = Mid(location.PathName, 2, len(location.PathName))

Set regExp = New RegExp
regExp.IgnoreCase = False
regExp.Global = True
regExp.Pattern = ".*/"

Set matchCollection = regExp.Execute(guiPath)

Set match = matchCollection(0)

guiPath = match.value

regExp.Pattern = "%20"

guiPath = regExp.Replace(guiPath, " ")

systemsDBPath = guiPath & "SaveData\SaveData.accdb"

Like I said, less than ideal. May not even work once I’m working with the application this will be running in. But I couldn’t find a better way.