finding out absolute path to a file from python

Question

If I have a file test.py that resides in some directory, how can I find out from test.py what directory it is in? os.path.curdir will give the current directory but not the directory where the file lives. If I invoke test.py from some directory foo , os.curdir will return foo but not the path of test.py .

thanks.

Answer 1

Here's how to get the directory of the current file:

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

Answer 2

the answer is to use:

 __file__

which returns a relative path.

os.path.abspath(__file__) 

can be used to get the full path.

Answer 3

The answers so far have correctly pointed you to os.path.abspath , which does exactly the job you requested. However don't forget that os.path.normpath and os.path.realpath can also be very useful in this kind of tasks (to normalize representation, and remove symbolic links, respectively) in many cases (whether your specific use case falls among these "many" is impossible to tell from the scant info we have, of course;-).

Answer 4

import os
dirname, filename = os.path.split(os.path.abspath(__file__))

Answer 5

os.path has lots of tools for dealing with paths and getting information about paths.

Particularly, you want:

os.path.abspath