[ruby] how to get the current working directory's absolute path from irb

I'm running Ruby on Windows though I don't know if that should make a difference. All I want to do is get the current working directory's absolute path. Is this possible from irb? Apparently from a script it's possible using File.expand_path(__FILE__)

But from irb I tried the following and got a "Permission denied" error:

File.new(Dir.new(".").path).expand

This question is related to ruby irb working-directory

The answer is


Through this you can get absolute path of any file located in any directory.

File.join(Dir.pwd,'some-dir','some-file-name')

This will return

=> "/User/abc/xyz/some-dir/some-file-name"

File.expand_path File.dirname(__FILE__) will return the directory relative to the file this command is called from.

But Dir.pwd returns the working directory (results identical to executing pwd in your terminal)


If you want to get the full path of the directory of the current rb file:

File.expand_path('../', __FILE__)

This will give you the working directory of the current file.

File.dirname(__FILE__)

Example:

current_file: "/Users/nemrow/SITM/folder1/folder2/amazon.rb"

result: "/Users/nemrow/SITM/folder1/folder2"


As for the path relative to the current executing script, since Ruby 2.0 you can also use

__dir__

So this is basically the same as

File.dirname(__FILE__)