In Java, the current working directory can be found using the following code:

Code :

public class JavaApplication {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Working Directory = " + System.getProperty("user.dir"));
  }
}

This will print the absolute path of the current directory from where your application was initialized.

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Explanation:

From the documentation:

java.io package resolve relative pathnames using the current user directory. The current directory is represented as a system property, that is, user.dir and is the directory from where the JVM was invoked.

Method #2:

Using java.nio.file.Path and java.nio.file.Paths, you can do the following to show what Java thinks is your current path. This is for 7 and on, and uses NIO.

Path currentRelativePath = Paths.get("");
String s = currentRelativePath.toAbsolutePath().toString();
System.out.println("Current absolute path is: " + s);

This outputs:

Current absolute path is: /Users/george/NetBeansProjects/Tutorials

that in my case is where I ran the class from.

Constructing paths in a relative way, by not using a leading separator to indicate you are constructing an absolute path, will use this relative path as the starting point.

Method #3:

The following works on Java 7 and up:

import java.nio.file.Paths;

Paths.get(".").toAbsolutePath().normalize().toString();

Getting current working directory in Java:

This will give you the path of your current working directory:

Path path = FileSystems.getDefault().getPath(".");

And this will give you the path to a file called “Foo.txt” in the working directory:

Path path = FileSystems.getDefault().getPath("Foo.txt");

Edit : To obtain an absolute path of current directory:

Path path = FileSystems.getDefault().getPath(".").toAbsolutePath();

* Update * To get current working directory:

Path path = FileSystems.getDefault().getPath("").toAbsolutePath();

Answer #4: Current working directory in Java

Java 11 and newer

This solution is better than others and more portable:

Path cwd = Path.of("").toAbsolutePath();

Or even

String cwd = Path.of("").toAbsolutePath().toString();

On Linux when you run a jar file from terminal, these both will return the same String: “/home/CurrentUser”, no matter, where youre jar file is. It depends just on what current directory are you using with your terminal, when you start the jar file.

Paths.get("").toAbsolutePath().toString();

System.getProperty("user.dir");

If your Class with main would be called MainClass, then try:

MainClass.class.getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource().getLocation().getFile();

This will return a String with the absolute path of the jar file.

Hope you learned something from this post.

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