I've got an executable, let's call it exec. It lives in a directory, for the sake of argument called dir. Let's say it's at the filesystem root. I can run this executable by doing

cd /dir

./exec

If I try to run it from anywhere else, by doing

/dir/exec

it fails to run. From the error message it spews out, it looks like it's trying to look for support files in the directory from which the command was run, not in its own directory. So far not a massive problem. However, I'd like to alias the command so I can call it from anywhere. I can write an alias as follows:

alias foo="cd /dir;./exec &"

But that leaves my terminal in /dir, which I don't want. I also don't want to change back to some arbitrary directory, I want to stay where I was.

Can this be done?