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Re: Portable Notebooks and Filenames[]

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg57894] Re: Portable Notebooks and Filenames[]
• From: "Jens-Peer Kuska" <kuska at informatik.uni-leipzig.de>
• Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 04:34:15 -0400 (EDT)
• Organization: Uni Leipzig
• References: <d8e4e7$gik$1@smc.vnet.net>
• Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Hi,

a) at least Mathematica under Windows understand 
"c:/YourFiles"
b) ToFileName[] will construct the file name from 
the directory names
   and the file without the explicit usage of "/" 
or "\"

Regards
  Jens

"frank" <frank at kuesterei.ch> schrieb im 
Newsbeitrag news:d8e4e7$gik$1 at smc.vnet.net...
> Hi,
>
> in our group we are using Mathematica both on 
> Windows and on Linux (and
> I'm about to convert a MacAddict to 
> Mathematica).  However, we are
> facing one problem with external file names.
>
> It is possible to use
>
> In[1]:=
> SetDirectory["some/directory/subdirectory"];
>
> (from a syntax point of view; of course the 
> beginning of the string will
> be different, like ~/netdrive vs. w:)
>
> On the other hand, this works only on Linux:
>
> In[2]:=FileNames["subdir/*"]
>
> while on Windows, only this construct works:
>
> In[3]:=FileNames["subdir\\*"]
>
> (\ needs to be escaped because \* or nearly any 
> \<letter> combination
> has some meaning).
>
> This is weird - first because Windows 
> understands the forward slash as a
> directory separator, and second because it means 
> we have to do
> search-replace orgies when trying a notebook on 
> a different OS.  This
> would not only happen in a preamble part, but we 
> even have some
> functions that read all data in a subdirectory, 
> for a list of
> subdirectories.
>
> Is there a way to write such expressions 
> portable?  Is there, for
> example, an internal variable "directory 
> separator" that could be used
> in this string?  Alternatively, if it's possible 
> to replace \\ by / (and
> vice versa) by some string matching mechanism, 
> we could write a function
> that does this if some boolean is set once in 
> the notebook, or even
> depending on some internal variable that 
> indicates the OS?
>
> Regards, Frank
> -- 
> Frank Küster
> Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
> Debian Developer
>