Ruby: __FILE__, __dir__ and symlinks

Ruby's __FILE__ keyword returns the path to the current file. On popular for this are Ruby binaries:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
$LOAD_PATH << File.expand_path('../../lib', __FILE__)
require 'my_cli'
MyCli.run!

However, if you create a symlink to this file, this will no longer work. __FILE__ will resolve to the path of the symlink, not to its target.

One solution is to use File.realpath(__FILE__).

In Ruby 2+ you can also use this:

$LOAD_PATH << File.expand_path('../lib', __dir__)

__dir__ is simply a shortcut for File.dirname(File.realpath(__FILE__)).

Tobias Kraze

makandra.de

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Last edit

Almost 6 years ago

Tobias Kraze

License

Source code in this card is licensed under the MIT License.

Sanitize user-generated filenames and only send files inside a given directory

If in your application your users pass along params that result in filenames, like invoices/generated?number=123. This could be your (very careless) controller method:

def generated
  send_file File.join(Rails.root, 'shared', 'invoices'...

Posted by Tobias Kraze to makandra dev (2016-08-23 12:50)

Ruby: __FILE__, __dir__ and symlinks

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