TIL: set working directory to local path in shell script

To find the local directory a bash script is being executed in, use the variable $BASH_SOURCE.

Combined with usual shell utilities like dirname, pwd, and cd, we can move our script execution to the local context. See this example:

#!/bin/bash

## Pre-setup: find & cd to test directory
parent_path=$( cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" ; pwd - P )

cd "$parent_path"

Here, $parent_path is set by first using cd to move to the absolute path of the script (stored in $BASH_SOURCE), then using pwd -P to get the directory tree leading to the execution context. Finally, we cd to the path stored in $parent_path.

Tags: til bash