Get filepath from shell working directory in Python?

Question

I'd like to accept a single argument in my script, much like "mkdir". If the argument is just a name, ie helloworld, it would use [pwd]/helloworld. If it contains something that could be taken as a filepath, ie ../helloworld, /home/x/helloworld, ~/helloworld, etc, then it would use those to resolve the final path. Is there a library like this that exists? Is Python even capable of getting the working directory of the shell that created it?

EDIT: Never mind the foolish bounty, not sure what caused the problem before, but it's working fine now.

Nader Alexan · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-29 13:14:19Z

4

I think this is what you're looking for:

import os
os.path.realpath(__file__)

answered Jun 29, 2013 at 13:14

Nader Alexan

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John Doe · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-02 09:14:43Z

2

+50

The way to do it is the following:

os.path.realpath(os.path.expanduser(__file__))

By default, realpath() doesn't handle tildas, so you need the expanduser() to do the dirty work.

answered Jul 2, 2013 at 9:14

John Doe

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tew · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-02 01:15:53Z

1

os.path.expanduser(path) will expand ~ and ~user to the home directory of user (http://docs.python.org/2/library/os.path.html).

os.getcwd() will get you the current (present) working directory.

os.path.realpath(__file__) will return the directory where the Python script is.

answered Jul 2, 2013 at 1:15

tew

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oleg · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-29 13:28:08Z

0

I think You are interested in os.getcwd() function. It returns a string representing the current working directory

>>> import os
>>> os.getcwd()
'/home/user/work'

Or One can use os.getcwdu() for getting unicode result. It returns a unicode string representing the current working directory.

>>> import os
>>> os.getcwdu()
u'/home/user/work'

answered Jun 29, 2013 at 13:28

oleg

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1 Comment

tkbx Over a year ago

But that's a very small part of the problem. Turns out I want os.path.realpath, except that it doesn't resolve ~/

Gabriel · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-05 18:16:35Z

You might want to consider using Unipath. Has many helper functions for path calculations as well as string-path calculations (subclasses str or unicode)

This is the original one for Unix: https://github.com/mikeorr/Unipath

This one works on windows too (I made some fixes to it): https://github.com/sesas/Unipath

>>> import unipath
>>> p = unipath.Path()
>>> p
Path(u'.')
>>> p.absolute()
Path(u'C:\\Python27\\Lib\\idlelib')
>>> p.child('hello_world')
Path(u'.\\hello_world')
>>> p = unipath.Path(__file__)  # cannot actually do this in IDLE 
>>> dir(p)
['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__doc__',
 '__eq__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__', '__getnewargs__', 
'__getslice__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__mod__', 
'__module__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', 
'__rmod__', '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', 
'__weakref__', '_formatter_field_name_split', '_formatter_parser', '_new_helper', '_walk', 
'absolute', 'ancestor', 'atime', 'auto_norm', 'capitalize', 'center', 'chdir', 'child', 
'chmod', 'components', 'copy', 'copy_stat', 'copy_tree', 'count', 'ctime', 'cwd', 'decode', 
'encode', 'endswith', 'exists', 'expand', 'expand_user', 'expand_vars', 'expandtabs', 
'ext', 'find', 'format', 'index', 'isabsolute', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isdecimal', 
'isdigit', 'isdir', 'isfile', 'islink', 'islower', 'ismount', 'isnumeric', 'isspace', 
'istitle', 'isupper', 'join', 'lexists', 'listdir', 'ljust', 'lower', 'lstat', 'lstrip', 
'mkdir', 'move', 'mtime', 'name', 'needs_update', 'norm', 'norm_case', 'parent', 
'partition', 'pathlib', 'read_file', 'rel_path_to', 'relative', 'remove', 'rename', 
'replace', 'resolve', 'rfind', 'rindex', 'rjust', 'rmdir', 'rmtree', 'rpartition', 
'rsplit', 'rstrip', 'set_times', 'size', 'split', 'split_root', 'splitlines', 'startswith', 
'stat', 'stem', 'strip', 'swapcase', 'title', 'translate', 'upper', 'walk', 'write_file', 
'zfill']

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