On 6/25/2010 7:25 AM, Jorgen Grahn wrote: > On Thu, 2010-06-24, Nobody wrote: >> 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. > > Another favorite is whether relative paths are relative to your > current directory, or to the location of whatever file this is to be > included /into/. > > For an example where it mattered (to C compilers), google for the > paper "recursive make considered harmful". It took compiler writers > decades to realize what the best choice was there. > > (By the way, -I commonly means "search this directory for include > files" rather than "include this file". You may want to avoid > confusing people by choosing another letter, like -i.) > > /Jorgen >
I just went ahead and implemented my own. It will eventually find it's way to: http://www.tundraware.com/Software/tsearchpath/ I'll post on c.l.p.a when the thing is released into the wild. Thanks to all that took the time to respond... -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tim Daneliuk tun...@tundraware.com PGP Key: http://www.tundraware.com/PGP/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
