Question

My script.py creates a temporary file using a relative path.

When running it as:

python script.py

it works as expected.

But it doesn’t work when you run it like:

python /path/to/script.py

The problem is that I don’t know which path it will be running in. How can I get the absolute path to the script folder (the "/path/to") so the temporary file can be created in the same directory as the script?

What about the following?

os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))

Answer 1

Per the great Dive Into Python:

import sys, os

print 'sys.argv[0] =', sys.argv[0]             1
pathname = os.path.dirname(sys.argv[0])        2
print 'path =', pathname
print 'full path =', os.path.abspath(pathname)