Re: [Gretl-devel] 'include' w/o 'open' -- new behavior
On Sat, 15 Dec 2007, Sven Schreiber wrote:
Below is an attempt to summarize the situation...
The four rules of path references in scripts:
1) plain name or relative path -> location is relative to either
the userdir or the cwd depending on the preference settings for
opening/saving files
Sort of.
* For the file read commands (append/open, run/include) we search
as described in the manual, with the addition that if the filename
is of the form "./foo" (or similar; I'll call these dotnames) we
start by checking the shelldir.
* For the file write commands (eqnprint -f, tabprint -f, outfile,
store) we use the userdir unless we're given a dotname, in which
case we use the shelldir.
2) absolute path -> is honored, may include runtime stuff like
@userdir or strings from getenv("HOME")
Yes.
3) ./ -> depends on the shelldir setting
Yes. And the shelldir is initialized to the CWD on program
start-up (though of course its settable thereafter). One other
thing: on read, if "./" doesn't find the file in shelldir, we also
try the actual CWD (which may not equal shelldir, for example if a
shell command involves a "cd").
4) execution location of shell commands ('!') also depend on
shelldir setting
Yes.
And last but not least: the cwd seems to be very fragile,
especially on windows
Could you give an example of what you mean by fragility?
Further question from Sven:
have I understood correctly that it is not possible to reference
from a script another file which is in the same directory? (of
course unless that directory is also the userdir or similar, and
unless the directory's name is hardcoded into the script)
Do you mean, that if a script references another file given as a
plain (non-dot) relative path, gretl will look for the latter in
the same place the script was found? If so, this is the case for
open/append and run/include. For example, if I do
gretlcli -b /some/odd/place/foo.inp
and foo.inp says "open baz.gdt", then we try looking for baz.gdt
in /some/odd/place. There's an internal variable "currdir" which
is set/reset each time a script is opened, and this directory is
prepended to the search path.
Allin.