Things on this page are fragmentary and immature notes/thoughts of the author. Please read with your own judgement!
When you call shell commands in your code, a nature question to ask is whether you should the absolute or a relative path (command). Both ways have their advantages and disadvantages.
Path of Executables
- Use the absolute path if the executable has a standard location.
- If an executable does not have a standard location, use command instead. If the executable is not always on the search path, provide an option for user to specify the path of the command.
Paths in Shell Commands
If you call a shell command from another language (e.g., Python) and the shell command takes a path as parameter, in most situations you want to use an absolute path to avoid potential issues.