On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 9:46 AM, Alex Vong <alexvong1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "Thompson, David" <dthomps...@worcester.edu> writes:
>
>> On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 6:00 AM, Alex Vong <alexvong1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Chris Marusich <cmmarus...@gmail.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> Info node "(guile) File System" describes a procedure for getting the
>>>> preferred file name separator of the operating system:
>>>>
>>>> -- Scheme Variable: file-name-separator-string
>>>> The preferred file name separator.
>>>>
>>>> Note that on MinGW builds for Windows, both ‘/’ and ‘\’ are valid
>>>> separators. Thus, programs should not assume that
>>>> ‘file-name-separator-string’ is the _only_ file name
>>>> separator—e.g., when extracting the components of a file name.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Is there an equivalent procedure for getting the preferred environment
>>>> variable path separator, too? I would expect such a procedure to return
>>>> the ":" string (or does it return a character?) on most GNU/Linux
>>>> distributions, since that is the separator e.g. for the PATH environment
>>>> variable.
>>>>
>>> I can't find one either. If the machine has perl/python, you could try
>>> (use-modules (ice-9 rdelim) (ice-9 popen))
>>> (read-line (open-pipe* OPEN_READ
>>> "perl"
>>> "-e"
>>> "use Config; print $Config{path_sep}"))
>>> or
>>> (use-modules (ice-9 rdelim) (ice-9 popen))
>>> (read-line (open-pipe* OPEN_READ
>>> "python"
>>> "-c"
>>> "import os; print(os.pathsep)"))
>>
>> Please don't do this. Use file-name-separator-string. Section 7.2.3
>> in the manual, titled "File System". In Emacs, you can press 'i' to
>> search the manual for identifiers.
>>
>> Another way of finding out things like this is to use the REPL:
>>
>> scheme@(guile-user)> ,a separator
>> (guile): file-name-separator-string
>> (guile): file-name-separator? #<procedure file-name-separator? (c)>
>> scheme@(guile-user)> file-name-separator-string
>> $2 = "/"
>>
> I think Christ is asking for ":" instead of "/", do we have environment
> path separator in Guile?
Sorry, I misunderstood.
The environment variable path separator is *not* defined depending on
the OS. It is up to the programs that interpret these search paths to
specify what the separator should be. ":" is the most common
separator, but that is just convention. A search path is opaque to
the operating system, where environment variables are just strings
with no inherent meaning.
Hope this helps.
- Dave
