From: Frederick Cheung <frederick.cheung@...>
Date: 2008-08-01T03:23:55+09:00
Subject: Re: How to get special directories?


On 31 Jul 2008, at 18:29, Niklas Baumstark wrote:

> Gordon Thiesfeld wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Niklas Baumstark
>> <niklas.baumstark@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Eric Hodel wrote:
>>>> On Jul 31, 2008, at 07:57 AM, Niklas Baumstark wrote:
>>>>> how can i get ruby to get me some special directories, such as the
>>>>> home-folder on linux or "documents and settings" on windows? is  
>>>>> there
>>>>> already some functionality available to do this or will i have  
>>>>> to use
>>>>> platform-native functions (for example COM on windows)?
>>>>
>>>> To get folders like 'documents and settings' on windows you need to
>>>> use win32api.  Depending on language, these may have different  
>>>> names.
>>
>> You can also use the win32-dir gem
>>
>> C:\>gem in win32-dir
>> Successfully installed win32-dir-0.3.2
>> 1 gem installed
>> C:\>irb
>>>> require 'win32/dir'
>> => true
>>>> Dir::PROFILE
>> => "C:\\Documents and Settings\\gthiesfeld"
>
> Thanks that'll help alot! Is something similiar available on linux as
> well?
>
Dunno about linux, but here's something that will work on mac os x.
The way mac os x tracks things like disk is a combination of a domain  
and a folder type.
Domains are thinks like user domain, local domain etc..., folder types  
are things like 'applications folder', 'library folder' and so on.
So (in C) the user's library folder (/Users/fred/Library in my case)  
is identified by kUserDomain, kDomainLibraryFolderType and the top  
level one (/Library) is identified by
kLocalDomain, kDomainLibraryFolderType

The following code uses rubyinline to call some C code. This doesn't  
seem to work if you paste it into irb, but as a standalone ruby file  
runs fine

require 'rubygems'
gem 'RubyInline'
require 'inline'

class Folder
   module Domains
     USER = -32763
     SYSTEM_DISK = -32768
     SYSTEM = -32766
     LOCAL = -32765
   end

   module Types
     def self.int_for_code code
       code.unpack('N').first
     end

     TOP = int_for_code 'dtop' #more of these constants in Folders.h
     DOCUMENTS = int_for_code 'docs'
   end

   inline do |builder|
     builder.include "<CoreServices/CoreServices.h>"
     builder.add_compile_flags "-framework CoreServices"
     builder.c_singleton "
       static char *find(int domain, unsigned long folder_type){
         char c_path[PATH_MAX];
         FSRef folder;
         if(noErr == FSFindFolder(domain, folder_type, true, &folder)){
           if(noErr ==FSRefMakePath(&folder, (UInt8*)c_path, PATH_MAX))
             return c_path;
         }
         /* decide what you want to do in case of failure */
         return \"err\";
       }
     "
   end
end

puts Folder::find(Folder::Domains::USER, Folder::Types::DOCUMENTS)  
#should output the user's documents folder
puts Folder::find(Folder::Domains::USER, Folder::Types::TOP) #should  
output the top level of the user domain, ie the home folder