This may seam a newbie question but it is not. It looks that common approaches are not always working:

Currently I know only two options but none of them looks to work an all cases.

sys.argv[0]

This means using path = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(sys.argv[0])) but this does not work if you are running from another python script from another directory, and this can really happen in real life.

__file__

this means that path = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__)) but I found that this doesn't work:

• py2exe that doesn't have a __file__ attribute but there is an workaround.
• when you run from IDLE with execute() there is no __file__ attribute
• OS X 10.6 where I get NameError: global name '__file__' is not defined

Related questions with incomplete answers:

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1296501/python-find-path-to-file-being-run
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1483827/python-path-to-current-file-depends-on-how-i-execute-the-program
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2259503/how-to-know-the-path-of-the-running-script-in-python
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/509742/python-chdir-to-dir-the-py-script-is-in