Chuck, thanks for your response. It turns out that the auto-deploy switch does affect the situation. New subdirs created after the auto-deploy is turned off are no longer being treated as separate apps and getRealPath is returning the path as I expected.
ServletContext.getResourceAsStream() is fine for accessing a file. In my case, I need to list all the files under an image directory. Here is my directory structure: Approot/sub1/test.jsp Approot/sub1/images/{image files} test.jsp needs to present a list of all images in the sub1 dir, thus it needs a File object representing "images". I tried to use ServletContext.getResource("/sub1/images"), the resultant URL was converted to an URI with .toURI() and fed to 'new File()'. It didn't work. File(URI) requires an URI with the "file" scheme. Qiao -----Original Message----- From: Caldarale, Charles R [mailto:chuck.caldar...@unisys.com] Sent: Friday, January 30, 2009 12:09 PM To: Tomcat Users List Subject: RE: application.getRealPath() in JSP from a subdirectory > From: Qiao Jin [mailto:bra...@gmail.com] > Subject: application.getRealPath() in JSP from a subdirectory > > I am using Tomcat 6.0.18, JDK 1.5 on CentOS 5. From within a JSP page, > applicaton.getRealPath() is returning results that I wasn't expecting. Using getRealPath() inside an app server of any kind is pretty much always a Bad Idea. If you need to access a file from your webapp, use ServletContext.getResourceAsStream(). If you need a place to store a file, it certainly shouldn't be inside the webapp deployment area, which should be treated as read-only. - Chuck THIS COMMUNICATION MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL AND/OR OTHERWISE PROPRIETARY MATERIAL and is thus for use only by the intended recipient. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the e-mail and its attachments from all computers. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org