From: stephen.hill@... (Steve Hill)
Date: 2001-10-29T21:00:53+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23719] Re: Dir.chdir behaviour  (was `pwd` behaviour in ruby?)

Hi,
I think I have traced the source of the problem that I have been
having.
(in ruby 1.6.2)

delaware% irb
irb(main):001:0> Dir.pwd
"/tmp_mnt/home/stehill1/tmp"
irb(main):002:0> `pwd`
"/tmp_mnt/home/stehill1/tmp\n"
irb(main):003:0> `bash -c pwd`
"/home/stehill1/tmp\n"
irb(main):004:0> `mkdir test`
""
irb(main):006:0> Dir.chdir "test"
0
irb(main):007:0> Dir.pwd
"/tmp_mnt/home/stehill1/tmp/test"
irb(main):008:0> `bash -c pwd`
"/tmp_mnt/home/stehill1/tmp/test\n"

Dir.chdir is switching to the absolute, hardware defined path when it
is invoked. OK, so Dir.pwd thinks it is in the absolute, hardware
defined path to start with.

Personally I find it rather inconvenient, since it makes it very hard
for me to pass directory names round a load balanced  system across a
dozen or so unix boxes with different hardware mount points e.g.
on one machine, /foo appears as /export/data/foo
but elsewhere,  /foo appears as /mnt/nfs/foo


Is there any chance of making ruby's Dir class configurable, so the
behaviour of Dir.pwd, Dir.chdir can be made appropriate for the system
one is running on?

Best regards

Steve