How to execute programs in the same directory as the windows batch file?

Question

I have in the same folder a .bat and a .exe file. I couldn't call the .exe file from the .bat unless I put the full absolute path to it. Is there a way to don't specify the path?

Adactylous

FYI: you couldn’t run a.cmd or .\\a.cmd because the current working directory of the shell was not the batch file’s directory. – Mark

Answer 1

Try calling the .exe with %~dp0, like this: %~dp0MyProgram.exe.

%0 contains the full path to the called .bat file.

~dp says to get the drive and path, including trailing \.

Spina

+1 vote just found this link on google search - weblogs.asp.net/whaggard/archive/2005/01/28/… – Sculptor

Patrick Cuff's answer above works, but fails if part of the directory path has spaces in its name. To get around this you need to put double quotes around the .exe call. "%~dp0MyProgram.exe" – Brandwein

To add to this answer, if you change your execution path to the current directory as follows: cd "%~dp0" you can just call MyProgram.exe just like that – Vasta

Answer 2

I solved this by changing the working directory using pushd at the start of the script and restoring is at the end of the script using popd. This way you can always assume the working directory is the same as the location of the bat file.

pushd %~dp0
ProgramInSameFolderAsBat.exe
popd

Faitour

Note that changing working directory could have side-effects within the executed file/script. In my case, I needed the working directory to remain as it was. @Patrick Cuff's answer worked in consideration of that – Cinelli

This code works best! I would add set workpath=%cd% before pushd %~dp0 to keep a reference to the working path which then can be passed to the .exe if needed like that ProgramInSameFolderAsBat.exe -workingpath "%workpath%" %* – Sahib

Answer 3

As Stephen C said, to properly support paths with spaces we can use:

start "%~dp0" "myfile.exe"

or with arguments:

start "%~dp0" "myfile.exe" -my_arguments

Infrequent