On Thu, 31 Mar 2016, at 08:03, Jon Wolfers wrote:
> Hi Jeremy,
>
> I'm not sure why you expect this to work.
>
> In dos* you can get back the value of an environment variable by encasing
> it in '%'s
> In rexx you get it back using the value bif
>
> so where you build a string to be interpreted by dos* using '%TEMP%' you
> would substitute value('TEMP',,'ENVIRONMENT') in rexx.
> In rexx the string '%TEMP%' is just a string and if it weren't then all
> sorts of other things would stop working.
Ah... I was too close to the problem, seeing it as a "temporary file
issue". You're saying
simply that oorexx doesn't support any use of environment variables in
filepaths.
I suppose I expected it to work because both the 'dos' command window
and Windows GUI
support use of percent-enclosed environment variable names, so I assumed
the support was
there at a fundamental level in the OS.
I hadn't noticed however that a percentage sign is a valid character in
a filename! So for example
if these files exist:
Directory of C:\Users\DAYTOD~1\AppData\Local\Temp
21/03/2016 19:06 447,997 20160321 fdc - so%wpo%ds - 9
letters.txtplain
31/03/2016 02:55 426,360 20160321 fdc - sowpods - 10
letters.txtplain
21/03/2016 19:02 87,346 20160321 fdc - sowpods - 5
letters.txtplain
21/03/2016 19:04 296,181 20160321 fdc - sowpods - 7
letters.txtplain
21/03/2016 19:05 401,610 20160321 fdc - sowpods - 8
letters.txtplain
one can use dir to find just the first one by
C:\>dir "%TEMP%\20160321 fdc - so%WPO%ds*"
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is F607-7930
Directory of C:\Users\DAYTOD~1\AppData\Local\Temp
21/03/2016 19:06 447,997 20160321 fdc - so%wpo%ds - 9
letters.txtplain
1 File(s) 447,997 bytes
0 Dir(s) 240,379,101,184 bytes free
I rather expected the 'dos' interpreter to replace the "%WPO% in the dir
command with a null
string, so it would be treated as:
dir "%TEMP%\20160321 fdc - sods*"
and find nothing, and that I'd need to escape the embedded percent signs
with "^" chars. But
it worked. Even (no quotes around the parameter) this works: dir
%TEMP%\*%WPO%ds*
So I suppose that whatever it is in 'dos' and the GUI that scans along a
string and replaced each
%something% with its value has been written to leave them alone if
there's no value.
--
Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
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