From: Mark Hahn <mchahn@...>
Date: 2002-01-02T08:37:54+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:29995] Re: How to check free diskspace?


> Yes, but I wonder, is this just something that cygwin is doing for us and
when we start distributing Ruby binaries compiled with MSVC++ will we lose
this feature?

This worked on ruby 1.6.5 compiled in an msvc project:

p File.new('c:/autoexec.bat').atime
 # => Fri Jun 08 15:26:16 GMT-8:00 2001

-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Tomson [mailto:ptkwt@shell1.aracnet.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2002 2:25 PM
To: ruby-talk ML; undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: [ruby-talk:29993] Re: How to check free diskspace?


In article <l5543usfb7glkkffmn0s77gl8a7eh0pn3k@4ax.com>,
Michael Kelly  <mkelly2002NOSPAM@earthlink.net> wrote:
>On Tue, 01 Jan 2002 00:54:18 GMT, Rik Hemsley <rik@kde.org> wrote:
>
>>Blame POSIX for not defining something useful... or not, because it's
>>pretty hard to come up with something generic.
>
>Seems like it would be a good area for a library module
>to make a generic interface to platform specific functions.
>As example Python has os.path module where 'path'
>just drags in the correct module for the platform, be
>it NT or Linux or whatever, and does stuff like join
>and split parts of file paths using the correct
>directory separator chars, glob files in a
>directory, get free disk space, file sizes
>and types etc.. so that the source of
>the script using the os.path module is
>the same.

Sounds like a good candidate for a module to convert to Ruby.
But how does it handle drive letters on Windows vs mount points on Unix?
I guess I'm thinking of something like Samba does, you can specify paths
like:
//samba_drive
and it gets mapped to, say, drive Z:

So, on Unix the path is something like: /samba_drive/blah/blah
but on Windows it's : Z:\blah\blah
How can I map between /samba_drive and Z: depending on which platform I'm
on?  (I've  used environment variables to do this, but maybe there's
a better way).  It might be nice if there was some way to check out the
drive mappings under windows and then map /samba_drive/blah/blah to
Z:\blah\blah on Windows (of course it would have to be some kind of
special platform independent path object)


>
>btw-I'm new to Ruby but one thing I *love* about
>it that is sort of related is the auto conversion of
>string constants for file paths, so in Win32 I can
>put "d:/Program Files/MyApp.exe" instead of
>the double-backslash bit "d:\\Program Files\\MyApp.exe"
>A nice touch.

Yes, but I wonder, is this just something that cygwin is doing for us and
when we start distributing Ruby binaries compiled with MSVC++ will we lose
this feature?  I don't think its somthing that Ruby is doing.(something to
keep in mind for that transistion)

Phil