Now, I won’t bore you with the actual details of how I came across this – lets just skip to the explanation and example:

First, even when it makes ‘sense’, you should not be using relative paths in your command line PHP scripts. I am so used to writing web PHP that I fell into this bad habit.

Show Me Why dirname() is your hero

Imagine a directory structure on windows like this:

C:\DEVELOPMENT\local>dir
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 1122-45E1

 Directory of C:\DEVELOPMENT\local

04/23/2009  08:40 PM              .
04/23/2009  08:40 PM              ..
04/23/2009  08:37 PM              includes
04/23/2009  08:40 PM              testdirname
               0 File(s)                    0 bytes
               4 Dir(s)  67,484,995,584 bytes free

We have two files: testdirname/script.php

1
2

includes/include.php

1

Now, let’s run the script as it is:

C:\DEVELOPMENT\local\testdirname>php script.php
I'm an include!
I've done ran, ya'll.

Not too bad – but note how we’re actually in the script.php’s working directory. What if we wanted to run it in a different directory?

C:\DEVELOPMENT\local>php testdirname\script.php

Warning: require_once(../includes/include.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in C:\DEVELOPMENT\local\testdirname\script.php on line 2

Well this makes sense because I programmed with that relative path.

Instead, change the require line in script.php to this:

1

This way, it always gets the full directory of the file itself (__FILE__ constant) – and THEN you can path to the file any which way you’d like.

Let’s check the output:

C:\DEVELOPMENT\local>php testdirname\script.php
I'm an include!
I've done ran, ya'll.

Yep – I KNOW – Simple. Its embarrassing to say it bit me – but it did