Re: finding datadir from executable

[Bruce Korb]

Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 11 Sep 2004, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> >> That, unfortunately, is too convoluted to figure out without real study.
> >> Without a clear example, I simply find the full, real path of the 
> >> executable
> >> and presume that the standard ../share/${program}/ is correct.  Probably
> >> an illuminating example would make life easier.....  :-)
> >
> > If a GPL'd solution is OK, I recommend libiberty.  I moved GCC's
> > make_relative_prefix into libiberty some time ago because I kept
> > needing this functionality elsewhere.
> >
> > You give it argv[0], BINDIR, and OTHERDIR; it computes the relative
> > path between bindir and otherdir, finds your application in $PATH or
> > similar, and works out the likely location of otherdir.
> 
> Similar code is currently embedded in libtool in order to support
> wrappers for executables under Cygwin.  The code should be portable.

All of these are buried to various degrees.  To be useful, it needs
to be a clear example -- maybe even a web page.  I haven't looked at
the libiberty code yet, but the gettext example was too obtuse for
me to want to spend the energy to reverse engineer it; and the libtool
example is also not readily apparent.  I suspect that the libiberty
variation is a run time computation, though BINDIR and DATADIR are
constructed at build time.  An autoconf macro that produced
BINDIR_TO_xxxxDIR at build time would be nice, simple and appreciated.