Stef Mientki <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I (again) wonder what's the perfect way to store, OS-independent, filepaths ? > I can think of something like: > - use a relative path if drive is identical to the application (I'm still a > Windows guy) > - use some kind of OS-dependent translation table if on another drive > - use ? if on a network drive
There is no perfect solution, since file names and semantics differ from one operating system to the next. Genera, the Lisp Machine operating system, has facilities to abstract over the details of the file systems in use in the 1980s: Multics, ITS, TOPS-20, VMS, Unix, etc. Many of the concepts were incorporated into the Common Lisp standard. Here are a couple of references: http://gigamonkeys.com/book/files-and-file-io.html#filenames http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/19_.htm The system described is not simple. Briefly, there's a machine-independent way (logical pathnames) to specify file names that a program can use to manipulate the files it knows about. There's no guarantee that you can access an arbitrary file with these names. However, there's also the concept of a machine-specific file namestring. Users can type in these machine-specific namestrings, allowing the code to access arbitrary files. Both types of pathnames can be manipulated via an API to derive other file names. Here's how I create a pathname that refers to a subdirectory of my home directory: (merge-pathnames (make-pathname :directory '(:relative ".sbcl" "systems")) (user-homedir-pathname)) The code should work so long as the target file system supports subdirectories, as Windows and Unix do. bob -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
