I thought I was done with all this, but then I went back to Firefox to close out some tabs and took a look at this: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/discovering-script-directory-path-531088/ I think I sent that URL to the list earlier. I think that web page was where I got some of my incorrect ideas, such as: For example, by issuing ../../my_script the result of "dirname $0" will be ../.. That is certainly false wherever I have tried it. Is it *ever* true or was the author just deluded? (As I was!) Then there is the claim that in bash, all external commands (e.g., dirname) can be avoided using this tactic: case $0 in */*) EXEC_DIR=${0:%/*} ;; *) EXEC_DIR=$PWD ;; esac Does that ever work? I think the problem is more than just missing quotes. It gives me this error: 0: %/*: syntax error: operand expected (error token is "%/*") Strangely, on that LinuxQuestions.org page, I didn't find anything that really worked for me despite the fact that the writers there seem to know a lot about bash scripting. Mike