Hi!

I think your main question has already been answered quite well, but here's a little more practical info for you in case you need to write a script that needs to read a config file from the same directory that the script is located, or something similar.

You can use the subroutine dirname() in the module File::Basename to get the script's location, using the perl special variable $0. You can then use the function chdir() to change your script's current working directory. Also, if you are want to make sure that $ENV{PWD} truly reflects your script's working directory, you can override perl's builtin chdir() with the one from the module Cwd, which will keep $ENV{PWD} up to date for you! Nifty, huh?

See the following code snippet for an example of how you might do this.

#!/usr/bin/perl -lw

use Cwd 'chdir';
use File::Basename;

print "started in $ENV{PWD}";

chdir dirname $0;

print "now in $ENV{PWD}";
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