OK, it appears there is a lot of confusion about how upward search is supposed
to work. I know I used to be confused for a long time so this is not so
surprising. You have to read the documentation very carefully and look at the
examples. (And the documentation is the same in version 7.4 as it was in
version 7.3.)
The thing to note is that using a relative path isn't just a shorter way to
give an absolute path. It actually means something quite different. IMO, it
should have been listed as a totally separate bullet point in the documentation.
With either kind of upward search, the stop directory (after the semi-colon)
works the same and isn't relevant to the issue at hand here. Leaving it blank
means the search will keep going upward as far as it can, which is what I
wanted.
When you give an absolute path, you are telling vim where to start the search.
When you give a relative path, you *always* start the search from the CWD, and
the relative path is a sort of relative "offset", which is appended to the end
of each directory traversed. So these use the path in a totally different way,
and you could actually imagine a generalized form of upward search that takes
three paths: start, offset, and stop. It is this "offset" feature that I need
and appears broken. The example in the help file should make it clear why such
a thing is useful.
I should point out that I still am unclear on exactly how path expressions
beginning with "." are meant to be handled. The search path expression ".;"
does in fact work in vim 7.4, but this is a corner case in which interpreting
"." as an absolute path (i.e., expanded before searching begins) gives you
behavior that is almost identical to interpreting it as a relative path (i.e.,
expanding it relative to each directory visited during searching). The
documentation does suggest that paths beginning with "." are supposed to be
handled as relative paths, but I suspect that is not actually being done in the
case of ".;".
Also, btw, my use of ":cd" in the example is not the issue. The example works
just the same if you first execute "cd .vim" in your shell and then start vim
from inside the ".vim" directory.
...Aaron
On Friday, December 20, 2013 10:21:48 AM UTC-5, Ben Fritz wrote:
> On Friday, December 20, 2013 7:51:25 AM UTC-6, Christian Brabandt wrote:
> > Hi Aaron!
> >
> > On Do, 19 Dez 2013, Aaron Bohannon wrote:
> >
> > > To reproduce (on standard *nix installation):
> > >
> > > (1) start vim in your home directory
> > > (2) :cd .vim
> > > (3) :echo findfile('.vimrc', expand('$USER') . ';')
> > >
> > > In vim 7.3, you get something like "/home/$USER/.vimrc".
> > >
> > > In vim 7.4, you get nothing.
> > >
> > > I can't understand why no one's reported this. Am I the only person on
> > > the planet who uses this feature? I don't know how to get by without it.
> >
> > You are giving only a partial directory name as stop dir. I am not sure,
> > this was ever supposed to work. I think, echo findfile('.vimrc',
> > '*'.expand('$USER').';') might work, however.
> >
>
> Well, I can confirm on Windows that the behavior changed between 7.3 and
> 7.4. But I think this is a case of misunderstanding how ';' is supposed
> to work. I was a little confused myself to begin with and tried the
> exact same thing to see the failure!
>
> Looking at :help file-searching, in the section on "upward search", it
> took a little while, but eventually I understood that you put the "stop
> directory" AFTER the ';', not before.
>
> I think both you and the OP intended to use ';'.expand('$USER') instead
> of the other way around.
>
> Some experimentation shows that these work, on Vim 7.4, when the
> directory is C:\Users\Ben\vimfiles\plugin:
>
> :echo findfile('_viminfo', ';')
> :echo findfile('_viminfo', ';Ben')
>
> This does NOT work, it doesn't echo anything as the OP reported:
>
> :echo findfile('_viminfo', 'Ben;')
>
> All three of these work as intended in Vim 7.3 on Windows.
>
> But, if I now understand ; properly, I think that 'Ben;' is actually
> saying, "starting in the subdirectory Ben of the current directory,
> search upwards". But here in vimfiles/plugin, there IS no subdirectory
> called "Ben". So Vim is probably correct to fail.
>
> ';Ben', on the other hand, tells Vim "starting in the current directory,
> seach upwards until you encounter the "Ben" directory. I think this is
> what the OP intended.
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