Trouble with pathname (i.e slashes) & windows

Ruby
1

Hi,

I am a bit of a ruby newbie, and i cant figure out this problem. I am
recursively searching through some directories, and when i find the
one i want, i try to pass it to an external process, through ‘system’
but the forward slashes screw things up.

i tried replacing the forward slashes through gsub, but i end up with
2 slashes. for example, if i am trying to ‘dir’ a path, this ends up
being sent through system:

dir c:\myStartDir/currentDir #obviously this wont work, so i tried
using gsub, and i get this

dir c:\myStartDir\currentDir #and ‘dir’ complains it cant find the
directory.

my code looks something like this

dirPath = File.dirname(path).gsub(’/’, “\”)
system("dir " + dirPath)

path is determined using Find.find(c:\myStartDir)

any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

2

On 9/27/07, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:

path is determined using Find.find(c:\myStartDir)

any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I use path.gsub(File::SEPARATOR, File::ALT_SEPARATOR) for the
conversion.
But I don’t think that’s your problem.

How did you print those paths? For me Find.find(“c:\ruby”) {|f| puts
f.gsub(‘/’, “\”)}
works fine. Can you replace system("dir " + dirPath ) with puts ("dir
" + dirPath) to see the output? If you use p to print values, it will
escape special chars, therefore slashes will be doubled. The same in
irb. Or, replace "dir " with "echo dir " and see the result.

I guess you should test dirPath whether it’s a directory. ()

system("dir " + dirPath) if File.directory? dirPath

or better still,

if File.directory? path
dirPath = File.dirname(path).gsub(‘/’, “\”)
system("dir " + dirPath)
end

Jano

3

On 9/26/07, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:

Hi,

I am a bit of a ruby newbie, and i cant figure out this problem. I am
recursively searching through some directories, and when i find the
one i want, i try to pass it to an external process, through ‘system’
but the forward slashes screw things up.

Your best bet is probably to follow these rules:

  1. Inside Ruby (meaning, anywhere but between two backtick characters
    or in the ‘system’ method), always use forward-slashes.

  2. When calling out to the system, do this:

class String
def nightmareify
self.gsub(///, ‘\\’)
end
end

irb> puts “c:/foo/baz”.nightmareify
c:\foo\baz

Feel free to choose a different method name, depending on your level
of irritation at this:

4

I figured out my problem…turns out that my path had spaces in the
name, and i forgot to surround the path with quotations. Kinda dumb,
but its not one of those things you think of immediately.

thanks!