I think there should be a GHC option --print-sharedir (or you could call it --print-datadir), corresponding to ghc --print-libdir. Thus on our system ghc --print-libdir prints out /home/linux-bkb/ghc/ghc-6.2.1/lib/ghc-6.2.1 and I would like ghc --print-sharedir to print out /home/linux-bkb/ghc/ghc-6.2.1/share/ghc-6.2.1 At the moment I use ghc --print-libdir | sed -e 's+/lib/\([^/]*\)$+/share/\1+g but this isn't exactly the happiest of solutions. The reason my scripts want access to the share directory is that they want access to HTML files and Haddock interfaces stored there.