What Does the _File_ Variable Mean/Do

What does __FILE__ mean?

1. The realpath() function gives you the file-system path, with any symbolic links and directory traversing (e.g. ../../) resolved. The dirname() function gives you just the directory, not the file within it.

2. __FILE__ is a magic constant that gives you the filesystem path to the current .php file (the one that __FILE__ is in, not the one it's included by if it's an include.

3. Sounds about right.

4. This is to translate from Windows style (\) paths to Unix style (/).

Is module __file__ attribute absolute or relative?

From the documentation:

__file__ is the pathname of the file from which the module was loaded, if it was loaded from a file. The __file__ attribute is not present for C modules that are statically linked into the interpreter; for extension modules loaded dynamically from a shared library, it is the pathname of the shared library file.

From the mailing list thread linked by @kindall in a comment to the question:

I haven't tried to repro this particular example, but the reason is
that we don't want to have to call getpwd() on every import nor do we
want to have some kind of in-process variable to cache the current
directory. (getpwd() is relatively slow and can sometimes fail
outright, and trying to cache it has a certain risk of being wrong.)

What we do instead, is code in site.py that walks over the elements of
sys.path and turns them into absolute paths. However this code runs
before '' is inserted in the front of sys.path, so that the initial
value of sys.path is ''.

For the rest of this, consider sys.path not to include ''.

So, if you are outside the part of sys.path that contains the module, you'll get an absolute path. If you are inside the part of sys.path that contains the module, you'll get a relative path.

If you load a module in the current directory, and the current directory isn't in sys.path, you'll get an absolute path.

If you load a module in the current directory, and the current directory is in sys.path, you'll get a relative path.

Why does python __file__ variable returns errorneous path when used in DJango?

To get a current directory path you can do something like this.

    import os  
    os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))

This will return a normalized absolutized version of the pathname(absolute path) as well as it will normalizes the path. For example, on Unix and Mac OS X systems the path /var/www/project will work fine, but on Windows systems that is not a good path. Normalizing the path will convert forward slashes to backward slashes. Normalization also collapses redundant separators, for example the path A/foo/../B will be normalized to A/B.

Rupesh

What does __FILE__ mean in Ruby?

It is a reference to the current file name. In the file foo.rb, __FILE__ would be interpreted as "foo.rb".

Edit: Ruby 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 appear to behave a little differently from what Luke Bayes said in his comment. With these files:

# test.rb
puts __FILE__
require './dir2/test.rb'

# dir2/test.rb
puts __FILE__

Running ruby test.rb will output

test.rb
/full/path/to/dir2/test.rb

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