[boost] relative/absolute paths in filesystem library

[Matthias Troyer]

I have started using the boost filesystem library in our application codes and encountered a problem that could be solved by adding either of the three functions

bool is_relative() const;
bool is_absolute() const;
void make_absolute();

to the path class.

Let me motivate this by an example: if the user specifies a relative path the file system library automatically prepends it with the result of a call to initial_directory(). In parallel programs however, even when the file system is shared, the result of a call to initial_directory() need not be the same on all nodes of a parallel machine. Thus I need to convert all relative paths to absolute ones before sending the path to another node.

At the moment I check for this by asking whether the first character is a '/', but this works only under Unix variants but not under Windows. Although we do not run our codes under Windows, other users of our libraries might and I would thus like to have a portable method, which could be implemented through either of the three functions mentioned above. Neither of the functions should be more than a single-line function.

What do you think about that?

Best regards,

Matthias

_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost