Re: Portable Notebooks and Filenames[]
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg57946] Re: Portable Notebooks and Filenames[]
- From: Paul Abbott <paul at physics.uwa.edu.au>
- Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 05:51:11 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: The University of Western Australia
- References: <d8e4e7$gik$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
In article <d8e4e7$gik$1 at smc.vnet.net>, frank <frank at kuesterei.ch> wrote: > in our group we are using Mathematica both on Windows and on Linux (and > I'm about to convert a MacAddict to Mathematica). A MacAddict to Mathematica? Many Mac addicts (I assume that this is what you mean) are already Mathematica users. > 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:) There are a number of global directory names, designed so that machine-independent filenames can be constructed: $AddOnsDirectory $UserAddOnsDirectory $BaseDirectory $HomeDirectory $InitialDirectory $TopDirectory $RootDirectory Most likely you will want to use $AddOnsDirectory or $UserAddOnsDirectory. > 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? Yes. Use of the above global directory names coupled with ToFileName is designed exactly for this application. Cheers, Paul -- Paul Abbott Phone: +61 8 6488 2734 School of Physics, M013 Fax: +61 8 6488 1014 The University of Western Australia (CRICOS Provider No 00126G) AUSTRALIA http://physics.uwa.edu.au/~paul http://InternationalMathematicaSymposium.org/IMS2005/