On Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:27:16 -0500, Tim Daneliuk wrote: > Given a program 'foo' that takes a command line argument '-I > includefile', I want to be able to look for 'includefile' in a path > specified in an environment variable, 'FOOPATH'. > > I'd like a semantic that says: > > "If 'includefile' contains one or more path separator characters, > ignore 'FOOPATH'. If it contains no path separators, look for it in > the paths specified by 'FOOPATH', beginning with the leftmost path > first." > > Is there a standard Pythonic idiom for doing this or do I need to cook > up my own.
There isn't an idiom. There are a surprising number of choices for such a simple task, e.g. whether the search path is used for relative paths containing a separator, whether you stop at the first file which exists or the first file which meets other criteria (e.g. suitable permissions), whether default locations come first or last, what happens if a default location is included in the search path, etc. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
