How do I get the directory that a program is running from?

If you fetch the current directory when your program first starts, then you effectively have the directory your program was started from. Store the value in a variable and refer to it later in your program. This is distinct from the directory that holds the current executable program file. It isn't necessarily the same directory; if someone runs the program from a command prompt, then the program is being run from the command prompt's current working directory even though the program file lives elsewhere.

getcwd is a POSIX function and supported out of the box by all POSIX compliant platforms. You would not have to do anything special (apart from incliding the right headers unistd.h on Unix and direct.h on windows).

Since you are creating a C program it will link with the default c run time library which is linked to by ALL processes in the system (specially crafted exceptions avoided) and it will include this function by default. The CRT is never considered an external library because that provides the basic standard compliant interface to the OS.

On windows getcwd function has been deprecated in favour of _getcwd. I think you could use it in this fashion.

#include <stdio.h>  /* defines FILENAME_MAX */
#ifdef WINDOWS
    #include <direct.h>
    #define GetCurrentDir _getcwd
#else
    #include <unistd.h>
    #define GetCurrentDir getcwd
 #endif

 char cCurrentPath[FILENAME_MAX];

 if (!GetCurrentDir(cCurrentPath, sizeof(cCurrentPath)))
     {
     return errno;
     }

cCurrentPath[sizeof(cCurrentPath) - 1] = '\0'; /* not really required */

printf ("The current working directory is %s", cCurrentPath);

This is from the cplusplus forum

On windows:

#include <string>
#include <windows.h>

std::string getexepath()
{
  char result[ MAX_PATH ];
  return std::string( result, GetModuleFileName( NULL, result, MAX_PATH ) );
}

On Linux:

#include <string>
#include <limits.h>
#include <unistd.h>

std::string getexepath()
{
  char result[ PATH_MAX ];
  ssize_t count = readlink( "/proc/self/exe", result, PATH_MAX );
  return std::string( result, (count > 0) ? count : 0 );
}

On HP-UX:

#include <string>
#include <limits.h>
#define _PSTAT64
#include <sys/pstat.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>

std::string getexepath()
{
  char result[ PATH_MAX ];
  struct pst_status ps;

  if (pstat_getproc( &ps, sizeof( ps ), 0, getpid() ) < 0)
    return std::string();

  if (pstat_getpathname( result, PATH_MAX, &ps.pst_fid_text ) < 0)
    return std::string();

  return std::string( result );
}

If you want a standard way without libraries: No. The whole concept of a directory is not included in the standard.

If you agree that some (portable) dependency on a near-standard lib is okay: Use Boost's filesystem library and ask for the initial_path().

IMHO that's as close as you can get, with good karma (Boost is a well-established high quality set of libraries)

Here's code to get the full path to the executing app:

Windows:

char pBuf[256];
size_t len = sizeof(pBuf); 
int bytes = GetModuleFileName(NULL, pBuf, len);
return bytes ? bytes : -1;

Linux:

int bytes = MIN(readlink("/proc/self/exe", pBuf, len), len - 1);
if(bytes >= 0)
    pBuf[bytes] = '\0';
return bytes;