How to get special directories?

Ruby
1

hi all,

how can i get ruby to get me some special directories, such as the
home-folder on linux or “documents and settings” on windows? is there
already some functionality available to do this or will i have to use
platform-native functions (for example COM on windows)?

Greetings,
Niklas

2

Niklas B. wrote:

hi all,

how can i get ruby to get me some special directories, such as the
home-folder on linux or “documents and settings” on windows? is there
already some functionality available to do this or will i have to use
platform-native functions (for example COM on windows)?

Greetings,
Niklas

I’m not sure if this’ll work, but “/” should get you the home folder in
linux, and “C:/Documents and Settings” should work fine on Windows.

3

Have you looked at Ruby’s ENV environment hash? Try:

p ENV

to see what’s available on your OS.

4

“/” should get you the home folder in linux

surely it should not.

and “C:/Documents and Settings” should work fine on Windows.

well, my home dir is under D:/home…

but you’re right, i could use File.expand_path("~") under linux. i could
maybe use COM under windows and use the scripting host to get the
directory. but this isn’t very elegant. is there no better way? if there
is none: is it possible to access COM from ruby?

Greetings,
Niklas

5

Dave B. wrote:

Have you looked at Ruby’s ENV environment hash? Try:

p ENV

to see what’s available on your OS.

sry, haven’t seen this before posting. the problem is, that it’s an app
that is shared between linux, windows and maybe OS X machines, so it
must be cross-platform. and ENV is not globally available. i’ve had the
sitation recently, that a SVN post-commit hook-script didn’t inherit its
variables from the environment so the ruby script it called didn’t have
any environment variables to use.

Greetings,
Niklas

6

Dave B. wrote:

Have you looked at Ruby’s ENV environment hash?

Not that it makes any kind of a difference, but ENV isn’t actually a
hash.
Just thought I’d mention that for correctness’ sake.

7

On Jul 31, 2008, at 07:57 AM, Niklas B. wrote:

how can i get ruby to get me some special directories, such as the
home-folder on linux or “documents and settings” on windows? is there
already some functionality available to do this or will i have to use
platform-native functions (for example COM on windows)?

To get folders like ‘documents and settings’ on windows you need to
use win32api. Depending on language, these may have different names.

8

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Niklas B.
[email protected] wrote:

Eric H. wrote:

On Jul 31, 2008, at 07:57 AM, Niklas B. wrote:

how can i get ruby to get me some special directories, such as the
home-folder on linux or “documents and settings” on windows? is there
already some functionality available to do this or will i have to use
platform-native functions (for example COM on windows)?

To get folders like ‘documents and settings’ on windows you need to
use win32api. Depending on language, these may have different names.

You can also use the win32-dir gem

C:>gem in win32-dir
Successfully installed win32-dir-0.3.2
1 gem installed
C:>irb

require ‘win32/dir’
=> true
Dir::PROFILE
=> “C:\Documents and Settings\gthiesfeld”

9

Eric H. wrote:

On Jul 31, 2008, at 07:57 AM, Niklas B. wrote:

how can i get ruby to get me some special directories, such as the
home-folder on linux or “documents and settings” on windows? is there
already some functionality available to do this or will i have to use
platform-native functions (for example COM on windows)?

To get folders like ‘documents and settings’ on windows you need to
use win32api. Depending on language, these may have different names.

okay so i have to make a platform switch… is it possible that you
could give an example of what API-Call to do and how?

Greetings,
Niklas

10

Gordon T. wrote:

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Niklas B.
[email protected] wrote:

Eric H. wrote:

On Jul 31, 2008, at 07:57 AM, Niklas B. wrote:

how can i get ruby to get me some special directories, such as the
home-folder on linux or “documents and settings” on windows? is there
already some functionality available to do this or will i have to use
platform-native functions (for example COM on windows)?

To get folders like ‘documents and settings’ on windows you need to
use win32api. Depending on language, these may have different names.

You can also use the win32-dir gem

C:>gem in win32-dir
Successfully installed win32-dir-0.3.2
1 gem installed
C:>irb

require ‘win32/dir’
=> true
Dir::PROFILE
=> “C:\Documents and Settings\gthiesfeld”

Thanks that’ll help alot! Is something similiar available on linux as
well?

Greetings,
Niklas

11

On 31 Jul 2008, at 18:29, Niklas B. wrote:

platform-native functions (for example COM on windows)?
C:>irb

require ‘win32/dir’
=> true

Dir::PROFILE
=> “C:\Documents and Settings\gthiesfeld”

Thanks that’ll help alot! Is something similiar available on linux as
well?

Dunno about linux, but here’s something that will work on mac os x.
The way mac os x tracks things like disk is a combination of a domain
and a folder type.
Domains are thinks like user domain, local domain etc…, folder types
are things like ‘applications folder’, ‘library folder’ and so on.
So (in C) the user’s library folder (/Users/fred/Library in my case)
is identified by kUserDomain, kDomainLibraryFolderType and the top
level one (/Library) is identified by
kLocalDomain, kDomainLibraryFolderType

The following code uses rubyinline to call some C code. This doesn’t
seem to work if you paste it into irb, but as a standalone ruby file
runs fine

require ‘rubygems’
gem ‘RubyInline’
require ‘inline’

class Folder
module Domains
USER = -32763
SYSTEM_DISK = -32768
SYSTEM = -32766
LOCAL = -32765
end

module Types
def self.int_for_code code
code.unpack(‘N’).first
end

 TOP = int_for_code 'dtop' #more of these constants in Folders.h
 DOCUMENTS = int_for_code 'docs'

end

inline do |builder|
builder.include “<CoreServices/CoreServices.h>”
builder.add_compile_flags “-framework CoreServices”
builder.c_singleton "
static char find(int domain, unsigned long folder_type){
char c_path[PATH_MAX];
FSRef folder;
if(noErr == FSFindFolder(domain, folder_type, true, &folder)){
if(noErr ==FSRefMakePath(&folder, (UInt8)c_path, PATH_MAX))
return c_path;
}
/* decide what you want to do in case of failure */
return “err”;
}
"
end
end

puts Folder::find(Folder::Domains::USER, Folder::Types::DOCUMENTS)
#should output the user’s documents folder
puts Folder::find(Folder::Domains::USER, Folder::Types::TOP) #should
output the top level of the user domain, ie the home folder

12

Siep K. wrote:

Niklas B. wrote:

Gordon T. wrote:

require ‘win32/dir’
=> true
Dir::PROFILE
=> “C:\Documents and Settings\gthiesfeld”

Thanks that’ll help alot! Is something similiar available on linux as
well?

Greetings,
Niklas

Can’t test, but on linux

require ‘etc’
Etc.getpwuid(0) #needs integer user id

should work. (
http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/etc/rdoc/classes/Etc.html#M000661
)

hth,

Siep

thank you all for your answers, i’m now gonna use win32-dir and etc,
ignoring OS X. can’t test it there.

Greetings,
Niklas

13

Niklas B. wrote:

Gordon T. wrote:

require ‘win32/dir’
=> true
Dir::PROFILE
=> “C:\Documents and Settings\gthiesfeld”

Thanks that’ll help alot! Is something similiar available on linux as
well?

Greetings,
Niklas

Can’t test, but on linux

require ‘etc’
Etc.getpwuid(0) #needs integer user id

should work. (
http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/etc/rdoc/classes/Etc.html#M000661
)

hth,

Siep

14

Nobuyoshi N. wrote:

It works with 1.8.7 and 1.8.6-p127 or lator, even on Windows,
and is the cross-platform and official recommended way.

File.expand_path("~") ?

Greetings,
Niklas

15

Hi,

At Fri, 1 Aug 2008 16:29:08 +0900,
Niklas B. wrote in [ruby-talk:309767]:

It works with 1.8.7 and 1.8.6-p127 or lator, even on Windows,
and is the cross-platform and official recommended way.

File.expand_path("~") ?

Yes.

16

Nobuyoshi N. wrote:

Hi,

At Fri, 1 Aug 2008 16:29:08 +0900,
Niklas B. wrote in [ruby-talk:309767]:

It works with 1.8.7 and 1.8.6-p127 or lator, even on Windows,
and is the cross-platform and official recommended way.

File.expand_path("~") ?

Yes.

irb(main):001:0> File.expand_path(’~’)
ArgumentError: couldn’t find HOME environment – expanding ~' from (irb):1:inexpand_path’
from (irb):1

under Windows XP Pro.

Greetings,
Niklas

17

Niklas B. wrote:

irb(main):001:0> File.expand_path(’~’)
ArgumentError: couldn’t find HOME environment – expanding ~' from (irb):1:inexpand_path’
from (irb):1

under Windows XP Pro.

Greetings,
Niklas

oh sorry! got an old version of ruby:

C:>ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i386-mswin32]

Greetings,
Niklas

18

Hi,

At Fri, 1 Aug 2008 01:36:20 +0900,
Niklas B. wrote in [ruby-talk:309687]:

but you’re right, i could use File.expand_path("~") under linux. i could
maybe use COM under windows and use the scripting host to get the
directory. but this isn’t very elegant. is there no better way? if there
is none: is it possible to access COM from ruby?

It works with 1.8.7 and 1.8.6-p127 or lator, even on Windows,
and is the cross-platform and official recommended way.