How to get the current (working) directory in Scala?

Question

How can I get the current directory (working directory) of the executing program in Scala?

Audrey

All of the answers of a similar question re Java will work for Scala as well: #4871551 – Digress

os-lib is the best modern solution, see my answer for more details. – Government

Answer 1

Use this System.getProperty("user.dir")

Edit: A list of other standard properties can be found here. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/environment/sysprop.html

Grits

If the response is correct, please accept the answer, so other can benefit from it. (A moderator) – Chronology

This seems the "most" correct answer of the answers provided, as it's a standard java property and therefore doesn't require the developer know what "." means (although all developers probably do). The java docs provide a definition for the property here: docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/environment/… – Hothead

updated the answer with the link provided by @jake. Thanks. – Grits

Answer 2

Use java.nio:

import java.nio.file.Paths
println(Paths.get(".").toAbsolutePath)

---

Remark on scala.reflect.io.File: I don't see any reason to look into scala.reflect packages for such mundane tasks. Getting the current working directory has usually nothing to do with Scala's reflection capabilities. Here are more reasons not to use scala.reflect.io.File: link.

Zealot

Answer 3

I use new java.io.File(".").getAbsolutePath, but all the other answers work too. You don't really gain anything by using Scala-specific API here over regular Java APIs

Pfaff

Answer 4

Use this:

import scala.reflect.io.File
File(".").toAbsolute

Audrey

Hi Neil, How can I get rid of the "./" part in the absolute path? – Roam

Can you give an example? Intuitively I would just use string pattern search replace to fix that. Maybe there’s a function for it, though. I’m not sure. – Audrey

@Roam use File(".").toCanonical instead. – Shelby

Answer 5

import scala.sys.process._
val cwd = "pwd".!!  //*nix OS

Shrug

When I tried this in Spark Scala in an EMR Notebook, I got cwd: String = "/ " which means it's not helping me see the absolute path... – Belshazzar

Answer 6

os-lib makes it easy to get the current working directory and perform other filesystem operations. Here's how to get the current directory:

os.pwd

It's easy to build other path objects from os.pwd, for example:

os.pwd/"src"/"test"/"resources"/"people.csv"

The syntax is intuitive and easy to remember, unlike the other options. See here for more details on how to use the os-lib project.

Government

have not managed to get the import part working. Added the lib to build.sbt and os is visible in external libraries but importing that to code is not working. How do you do it? – Townscape

@juske - you shouldn't need to import anything. The code is in the os package, so os.pwd is the full path. You might just need to reload IntelliJ as you would whenever a dependency is added to the build.sbt file. – Government

thanks for quick reply! still getting an error: not found: value os although there is sbt: com.lihaoyi:os-lib_2.13:0.78.jar under external libraries – Townscape