FLflohofwoe·Sep 3, 2024
There's also this very handy and tiny cross-platform library:
https://github.com/gpakosz/whereami
In Why bother with argv[0]?gpakosz
whereami
C2015–2024
gpakosz / whereami
whereami
Locate the current running executable and the current running module/library on the file system 🔎
3Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
531GitHub stars
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What it is
Locate the current running executable and the current running module/library on the file system 🔎
GitHub
Where it is used
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-03-05 19:38:26 UTC to 2024-09-03 14:24:21 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesOne missing approach is just appending the binary data to the end of the file, and then reading the resource from /proc/self/exe on Linux (or the equivalents on Mac and Windows).
It's not "portable" per-se, but all modern platforms [1] have a way to interrogate the binary contents of the currently-running executable.
[1] _NSGetExecutablePath, GetModuleFileName(), getexecname() etc
EDIT: Apparently https://github.com/gpakosz/whereami will manage a lot of this complexity for you
In What's the most portable way to include binary blobs in an executable?Finding the data belonging to an installed application is not portable across operating systems, so embedding the data will result in much simpler code.
When the application starts, the current working directory can be anywhere, you need to find the absolute paths to the data files, and this works differently on each operating system.
One solution is to find the path of the current executable, and doing this in a portable way is several hundred lines of code already, e.g.: https://github.com/gpakosz/whereami/blob/master/src/whereami...
In Incorporating and accessing binary data into a C programWhere Am I? Locate the current executable and the current module on disk
1 points · Open discussion