For sure, and the funny thing is that it can be replaced often by replaced by the simpler and more readable DIR=$(dirname $(readlink -f $0)) However OS X

For sure, and the funny thing is that it can be replaced often by replaced by the simpler and more readable DIR=$(dirname $(readlink -f $0)) However OS X doesn't have readlink, so the longer BASH_SOURCE thing makes sense there. I started using the longer one, and then I gave up on shell scripting on OS X for other reasons, and didn't go back. So yeah there is a lot of random cargo culting. In Oil I hope to provide an even simpler method that's built in (and it also has readlink builtin to support this) https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/587 https://github.com/oilshell/oil/issues/587