[Gretl-devel] 'include' w/o 'open' -- new behavior

[Sven Schreiber]

Am 14.12.2007 19:22, Sven Schreiber schrieb:
> Am 14.12.2007 16:34, Allin Cottrell schrieb:
>>
>> Up till now, the "./" notation for filenames has always just used the 
>> actual current working directory, which is not necessarily the same 
>> as "shelldir": the latter was used strictly for shell commands, and 
>> gretl's "open", "include" and so on are not shell commands.  However, 
>> this does seem unintuitive so I'm modifying gretl's path searching: 
>> if shelldir is set, it will be checked first when gretl is asked to 
>> open a filename that starts with "./" or "../".
>>
>>   
>
> Ah yes I vaguely remember all those directory issues when I was 
> hacking around with py4gretl. I still find it confusing though; some 
> day when I find the time I'll try to write down some documentation and 
> possibly make suggestions for improvement...
>
>

Below is an attempt to summarize the situation (corrections are most 
welcome), but first let me ask: have I understood correctly that it is 
not possible to reference from a script another file which is in the 
same directory? (of course unless that directory is also the userdir or 
similar, and unless the directory's name is hardcoded into the script) 
That would be a bit unfortunate IMHO (but I hope there is a clever way 
to achieve this that you will tell me...:-)

The four rules of path references in scripts:

1) plain name or relative path -> location is relative to either the 
userdir or the cwd depending on the preference settings for 
opening/saving files
2) absolute path -> is honored, may include runtime stuff like @userdir 
or strings from getenv("HOME")
3) ./ -> depends on the shelldir setting
4) execution location of shell commands ('!') also depend on shelldir 
setting

What commands are affected: include/run -- store -- outfile -- 
open/append -- ! (shell) -- eqnprint/tabprint -f

And last but not least:  the cwd seems to be very fragile, especially on 
windows

Is all this correct?

thanks,
sven