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If you have a Ruby script say in ~/src/ruby/my_script that you are symlinking to from ~/bin/my_script, then invoking File.dirname(__FILE__) in that script will yield the directory of the symlink not the directory of the script file. If you want the directory of the script file you can do this instead:

THIS_FILE = File.symlink?(__FILE__) ? File.readlink(__FILE__) : __FILE__

THIS_FILE will contain the path to the script file instead of the path to the symlink. This is valuable if say you want to require some Ruby library from your script and you are using a relative path.