oddity regarding execution

[Malcolm Kay]

On Sun, 6 Jul 2003 04:56, Kirk Bailey wrote:
> I am using FreeBSD and sendmail to work on the internet. Recently I wrote a
> program to process a incoming email and append it to a file in it's own
> directory. I have a complete email in a file in the directory for testing,
> and I fired it up from the command line prompt using input redirection to
> draw input from the file; it worked fine. So I created an alias pointed at
> it, and fired off a test message.
>
> Well, when the alias fed the message to it, it barked. 'unknown mailer
> error 1' says the log. Ran it with the sample file, worked fine; even
> modified the testcase a little, still fine. Hmmmm... So I added a line to
> the script, so it would open a file and write it's current path, and very
> carefully detailed EXACTLY where this file lived, having a suspicion. BARK!
> Although it still barked like a dog, it gave me my confirmation; when
> executed by an alias, it thinks the cwd is '/'!!! I modified the script to
> point EXACTLY to the location of the recipient file of the data, and all
> was now well, either way.
>
> HHMMMMMMMMMMMMM..... is this a freebsd quriosity, a sendmail quriosity, or
> what all? And is there anything I can do so the cwd will be the dir the
> script is living in?

Normal: the thought of scripts setting current directory by default is 
horrific!

You can use something like:

  #!/bin/sh
  cd `dirname $0`
  pwd

Malcolm Kay