From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2006-08-14T14:00:11+09:00
Subject: Re: sh command that ascends dir tree for executable

On Sun, 13 Aug 2006 23:36:51 +0000, Jeffrey Schwab wrote:

> Trans wrote:
>> Jeffrey Schwab wrote:
>>> Trans wrote:
>>>> Thanks Jeffrey and Ken. I was thinking maybe there was a util for this
>>>> already but I suppose not. I wrote code like this:
>>>>
>>>>   Dir.chdir('..') until File.exectuable?( file )
>>>>
>>>> It does change the directory, but for my purposes that's okay. See any
>>>> problems with that? Work with Windows okay?
>>> It'll loop forever if the file doesn't exist.
>> 
>>   Dir.chdir('..') until File.exectuable?( file ) or Dir.pwd == '/'
>> 
>> Will that work on Windows? If not what do I need to match?
> 
> 'Fraid not.  Windows filesystems don't allow mounting the way Unix 
> filesystems do, so you end up with multiple "root" directories whose 
> names include letters and colons.  E.g., you probably know that the hard 
> drive of most PCs is called "C:\".
> 
> Pathname.root? seemed promising, but it doesn't work properly on 
> Windows, either.   Windows isn't a very good collection of operating 
> systems, and I think most Ruby developers are smart enough to avoid it.

Does Pathname.getwd.parent==Pathname.getwd work on Windows?
I didn't realize there was Pathname.root? for me to use it would probably
have simplified things in my code a lot.

--Ken

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/