From: Massimiliano Mirra <list@...>
Date: 2002-01-12T10:12:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Dir.entries have no home

On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 04:44:42AM +0900, Ron Jeffries wrote:
> Thanks David and Massimilano for your interesting and helpful replies.
> Looks like I should get 1.7. Is it pretty stable as such things go?

I don't know, but the snippet I reported works under 1.6.6, and the
block version of chdir should be easy to implement under 1.6.x if you
prefer to wait for the next stable release.

> Where I was really going, though, was to a different issue.
> I'm suggesting that the objects involved in the Dir.entries, FileTest,
> and File families aren't quite right. Think of it this way:

FWIW: yes, I understood what you meant.  I think you're not really
after a ``File'' object (with opening, closing, writing etc.) but
rather a ``FileDescription'' object.  This would still raise the
synchronization issues someone mentioned, but not differently than the
(so to speak) low-level manual path-building counterparts.  So good
news and no bad news.

It would be great if Dir.entries returned some collection of objects,
each of them with data like [absolute_path, atime, ctime, permissions]
and a method like ``refresh'' or ``ping'':

if file.ping # file still exists and specs get updated
  `command #{file.abspath}`
else # ping returned false
  puts "File #{file.name} was moved or deleted."
end

Massimiliano