Patient monks,

I come again with another in a continuing line of questions -- How do I find the path of the script running as a Win service? I have the following scenario.

  1. foo.pl is converted to foo.exe using pp.
  2. foo.exe is then copied to another computer, say, under E:\programs\foo\foo.exe
  3. The Win command sc is used to create a service called foo.
I want foo, the service, to figure out the path of foo.exe.

Here is what I have tried --

File::Spec->rel2abs(curdir()), $FindBin::Bin, Cwd->cwd() all suffer from the same problem thusly: the path returned is the ostensible path to the service, of the form "C:\Windows\System32", not "E:\programs\foo", the path to foo.exe that is being run as that darned service.

I finally implemented the following solution -- 

  @path = split(/\\/, $0);
  pop(@path);
  $path = join('\\', @path);

[download]
The above works, however, is there a less ugly solution?

I have a related question -- 

BEGIN {
 my $foo = 'bar';
}
print $foo;

[download]
doesn't work for obvious reasons. However, neither does 
my $foo = 'bar';
BEGIN {
 print $foo;
}

[download]
Why? Does BEGIN have its own namespace? How can I declare something once (like the $path to the script I am trying to figure out above), and have it be picked up in the BEGIN block as well as in the rest of the script or any other module that I might use in the script?

Many thanks.

In reply to finding the path of the script running as Win service by punkish

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