After returning from Yellowstone I was busy the last few days to abstract a few operations we have been doing all the years although it is possible to optimize them. In particular we do append resources (the idea is loosely based on the Mac idea) to the end of our executables for small information items that should always be in sync with the compiled code. Under Unix there is no standard way to open the current process executable, so the original code did search for argv[0] along the path.
Under more modern Unix variants there is the /proc that allows one to open the running executable more easily, for example /proc/self/exe under Linux or /proc/self/object/a.out under Solaris. A few platforms like Irix or Tru64 make that more difficult as one has to open /proc/<pid> first and then use ioctl(..., PIOCOPENM, 0) to retrieve an open file descriptor for the zero mapping (the main executable).
Still some Unix variants like AIX 4 or MacOS X do not provide any of this so we still have to search along the path, a bit fragile and ugly.
Appearently even more ugly it gets if you want to open a shared library. The current solution compiles in the name of the shared library (ugh) and searches according the OS search rules for shared libraries. As far as I thought about this one could either call dladdr to find the name of the shared library a function is in or use the /proc file system mapping enumeration to do it. I will see which version works best.