Learn Linux Shell Scripting - Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

Managing absolute and relative paths

There is an issue we have not discussed yet: running scripts with absolute and relative paths. This might seem like a trivial difference, but it most certainly is not. Most commands you run, while directly interactive or from within a script you call, use your current working directory as their current working directory. You might have expected commands in a script to default to the directory where the script is, but since the script is nothing more than a fork of your current shell (as explained at the beginning of this chapter), it also inherits the current working directory. We can best illustrate this by creating a script which copies a file to a relative path:

reader@ubuntu:~/scripts/chapter_09$ vim ...