Get the Directory Path of a Bash Script

Paul — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 23:42:27 +0000

So you have a bash script and you want to run it from crontab or some other context where the current working directory isn’t known. Your script wants to use relative path information (from the script itself), perhaps to create a directory structure in the script’s base directory.

The question is: How do you get the directory path of the script? dirname? Not reliably.

#!/bin/bash
ABSPATH="$(cd "${0%/*}" 2>/dev/null; echo "$PWD"/"${0##*/}")"
CWD=`dirname "$ABSPATH"`

Nice!

Recursive directory merge

Paul — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:08:00 +0000

Problem: I have two directories that are similar in structure but different in content. Say one is an older snapshot of the other. I want to copy the stuff from the new directory into the old directory (recursively).

Copy:
rsync -a SOURCE/ DEST/ --ignore-existing --whole-file

Move (no clobber):
rsync -a SOURCE/ DEST/ --remove-sent-files --ignore-existing --whole-file

Move (and clobber):
rsync -a SOURCE/ DEST/ --remove-sent-files --whole-file

Move, but only update with newer:
rsync -a SOURCE/ DEST/ --remove-sent-files --update --whole-file

cat brain.log | less » path

Get the Directory Path of a Bash Script

Recursive directory merge