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How to set the current working directory of a Node.js program

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I had this problem with a Node.js script I wrote.

I had set relative paths to reference some files in the local filesystem, like this:

../../dev/file.md

and if I ran the program from the folder it was, no problem.

But if I ran the file from another folder, from example the parent folder, the relative links would break.

To fix this, at the beginning of the program, I set

const process = require('process')
process.chdir(__dirname)

This set the current working directory of the process to __dirname which points to the current file’s parent folder path.

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