I'm trying to set up dotfiles/config, which I will be storing in github and using across multiple devices.
One of the things I want to achieve is that no matter where I clone my dotfiles, once I source it I will automatically have aliases like updateDotfiles that will pull the latest changes.
In order to achieve this, I tried putting export DOTFILES_PATH=${0:P:h} into my .zshrc so that I can automatically detect the path to my dotfiles folder.
This works exactly how I want it to if I run source ~/.zshrc (which is a symlink). What I've noticed is that when I first open a new terminal tab/window, ${0:P:h} resolves to the wrong location. If I remove :h from it and echo the result I get /Users/me/-zsh and then if I run source ~/.zshrc I get /Users/me/dotfiles-and-utils/.zshrc
Is there something I'm missing here? How do I get it to work for both new windows and individual source runs?
In case it's relevant, I'm using iTerm2 and oh-my-zsh
I came across the following Q&A which set me off in the right direction (I won't pretend to understand what it's doing exactly) https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/249606/get-full-path-of-current-zsh-startup-file-e-g-zshrc-or-zshenv
Using ChatGPT I managed to tweak it to work how I wanted, the solution was to use DOTFILES_PATH=$(dirname $(realpath ${(%):-%N}))
realPath resolves any symlinks you have set up
In my case I wanted the directory I was storing my zshrc file, hence the use of dirname