Ok, so I see what is going on with PATH, and it was fascinating (at least to me) and I am really glad I asked: it never ever occurred to me to literally put "."

Ok, so I see what is going on with PATH, and it was fascinating (at least to me) and I am really glad I asked: it never ever occurred to me to literally put "." or (apparently even more critically) even "" on a PATH, due to the ever-present danger of entering a folder with a trojan horse called "ls" and getting toasted. When I was talking about "." being on my PATH I meant like, running the program from inside /usr/bin. If I put "~/bin" on my path and run foo it gets converted to an absolute /home/saurik/bin/foo, but if I put "." on my PATH and go into the folder... yeah: you managed to pull off leaving me with just "foo" in $0. I still can't use dirname for most of my scripts, though :(. (If it makes you feel any better, I do often use dirname if it's there.)