On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Baz Walter <baz...@ftml.net> wrote: > On 03/05/10 18:12, Grant Edwards wrote: >> On 2010-05-03, Baz Walter<baz...@ftml.net> wrote: >>>> Sort of. The file in question _has_ a full path, you just can't tell >>>> what it is based on the path you used to open it. >>> >>> yes, that's exactly what i was trying to demonstrate in my OP. i can >>> use python to open a file; but under certain circumstances, there >>> seems to be no guarantee that i can then use python to locate that >>> file in the filesystem. >> >> Exactly. >> >> In your example, it's simply not possible to determine the file's >> absolute path within the filesystem given the relative path you >> provided. >> >> You requested something that wasn't possible. It failed. What do you >> think should have happened? > > path = '../abc.txt' > > os.path.realpath(path) -> "OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory" > > therefore: > > open(path) -> "IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory" > > i think that if the first of these seemingly "impossible" requests fails, it > is reasonable to expect that the second one also fails. but the second one > (sometimes) doesn't. > > i think they should always either both succeed, or both fail.
Well, that's Unix and Worse-is-Better[1] for ya. Inelegant theoretically, but probably makes some bit of the OS's job slightly easier and is usually good enough in practice. Pragmatism is a bitch sometimes. :-) Cheers, Chris -- [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
