Finding startup files

[jeff elkins]

On Wednesday 11 May 2005 04:44 pm, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2005-05-11, hemagician at gmail.com <hemagician at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The following script demonstrates a method that should work for you. I
> > believe it is entirely cross-platform.
> >
> > #! /usr/bin/python
> >
> > import sys
> > import os
> >
> > print os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(sys.argv[0]))
>
> That will probably work most of the time, but...
>
>  1) you're not gauranteed that argv[0] contains the application
>     path/filename.
>
>  2) the directory containing the executable is not where
>     configuration files are supposed to be stored under
>     Unix/Linux.

Thanks Grant,

I live and develop in Linux, but unfortunately, 99.99% of the users of this 
particular application (analysis of medical laboratory data) will be working 
with Windows. 

I'm totally new to Python (obvious,yes?) so how might argv[0] fail?

Jeff