[geggam]

I think shell is the most plagiarized code in existence.

So many sysadmins have rudimentary skills and simply copy what works.

I have seen some folks with huge repos of code snippets like that

[chubot]

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

[renewiltord]

I think I actually eventually solved this by installing `coreutils` on OS X and using `realpath`.