From: grzegorz@... (Grzegorz Chrupala)
Date: 2003-06-18T23:14:39+09:00
Subject: Re: File.expand_path with files beginnig with ~ (tilde) on Windoze

"J.Hawkesworth" <J.Hawkesworth@talis.com> wrote in message news:<8AD592BF2F0DD34E896E6283E53E8528DAAEF7@cally.talis.com>...

I think I didn't make myself sufficiently clear. On Unix, we get the
following, sensible behaviour:

  irb(main):004:0> File.expand_path("~grzegorz")
  => "/home/grzegorz"

Indeed, "~someuser" expands as expected to the home directory of user
"someuser".  If "someuser" does not exist. an error is signalled,
which again is reasonable, although the side-effect is that one cannot
give to File.expand_path file names that _really_ start with "~"
(which on Unix is not a big deal, since such files are uncommon).

On Windoze, where the "~" convention is not used, in my opinion file
names starting with "~" should _not_ be treated specially. When
current directory is "C:/", I would expect

  File.expand_path("~$foobar")

to return "C:/~$foobar", just like

  File.expand_path("foobar")

returns "C:/foobar"

An alternative would be to signal an error, but silently returning
"~$foobar" doesn't make much sense. There is no reason on Windoze to
use the Unix convention and treat file names starting with "~" any
different that other files. What makes worse is the fact that many
temp files created by M$ Office applications use names starting with
"~$".
I hope this clarifies matters a bit.
Thougths?
--
Grzegorz