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I'm running Ruby on Windows though I don't know if that should make a difference. All I want to do is get the current working directory's absolute path. Is this possible from irb? Apparently from a script it's possible using File.expand_path(__FILE__)

But from irb I tried the following and got a "Permission denied" error:

File.new(Dir.new(".").path).expand
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    The question is not actually clear: Do you want a) the current working directory (which is Dir.pwd) or do you want the directory where the currently running script is located (which is File.dirname(__FILE__))? Imagine calling a script from anywhere else (like ruby testdirectory/testscript.rb) here, the two will be different!
    – amenthes
    Commented Mar 22, 2015 at 21:13
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    @amenthes You claim my question is unclear and then ask "Do you want a) the current working directory ...." and my question states "All I want to do is get the current working directory's absolute path...". What's unclear?
    – Dexygen
    Commented Jul 18, 2015 at 23:57
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    it's unclear because of the sentence " Apparently from a script it's possible using File.expand_path(__FILE__)" - because __FILE__'s location is a different animal than current working dir (which is Dir.pwd).
    – amenthes
    Commented Jul 19, 2015 at 9:06
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    @amenthes I thought I did a pretty good job differentiating "from irb" which is right there in the title of the question (and twice within the question itself), from "from a script"
    – Dexygen
    Commented Jul 19, 2015 at 14:49
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    The reason the question is very unclear is that even in a script, File.expand_path(__FILE__) does not "get the current working directory's absolute path".
    – Ken Williams
    Commented Jul 2, 2021 at 19:07

7 Answers 7

Reset to default
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Dir.pwd is the current working directory

http://ruby-doc.org/core/Dir.html#method-c-pwd

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    Note: this does not return the location of the current file. In order to do that, see the answers below. This only returns the current working directory of the shell which is calling the script (just like pwd), which might be somewhere completely different than where the script file is located.
    – GDP2
    Commented Feb 18, 2020 at 19:29
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    @GDP2 It does EXACTLY what I asked: "get the current working directory's absolute path".
    – Dexygen
    Commented Oct 11, 2020 at 17:45
  • @Dexygen That's fine for you. I had a different use case scenario and so I made a note for myself and anyone else who might face the same issue. As you can see from the upvotes on the answer below, there are almost 200 others (at least) who also had the same issue.
    – GDP2
    Commented Oct 11, 2020 at 20:06
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File.expand_path File.dirname(__FILE__) will return the directory relative to the file this command is called from.

But Dir.pwd returns the working directory (results identical to executing pwd in your terminal)

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    Dir.pwd is equivalent to pwd -P. exec('pwd -L') will get the equivalent of pwd in the terminal (pwd is normally a bash builtin, and doesn't resolve symbolic links).
    – Barry Kelly
    Commented Jan 26, 2014 at 3:27
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    please take also a look to the often forgotten Pathname class: ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.1.1/libdoc/pathname/rdoc/Pathname.html
    – awenkhh
    Commented Jun 27, 2014 at 19:26
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    There is a problem, Dir.pwd will print the working directory of where the script is ran - which may not be what you want.
    – Brandon
    Commented Oct 13, 2014 at 20:24
  • Yes, assuming that you run command bundle exec rspec spec in directory '/project', while in file 'spec/spec_helper.rb', the value of Dir.pwd will still be '/project'.
    – hiveer
    Commented Mar 27, 2018 at 3:01
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As for the path relative to the current executing script, since Ruby 2.0 you can also use

__dir__

So this is basically the same as

File.dirname(__FILE__)
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This will give you the working directory of the current file. 

File.dirname(__FILE__)

Example:

current_file: "/Users/nemrow/SITM/folder1/folder2/amazon.rb"

result: "/Users/nemrow/SITM/folder1/folder2"

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    Please note that the working directory must not be the same as the actual file. So Dir.pwd and your suggestion might potentially differ.
    – Besi
    Commented Feb 2, 2015 at 13:41
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Through this you can get absolute path of any file located in any directory.

File.join(Dir.pwd,'some-dir','some-file-name')

This will return

=> "/User/abc/xyz/some-dir/some-file-name"
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If you want to get the full path of the directory of the current rb file:

File.expand_path('../', __FILE__)
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If you don't plan on running your code on Windows or anything other than *nix.

`pwd`.chop
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