note moritz <blockquote>and make these programs aware of their immediate surrounding structures regardless of where in the directory tree the folder 'project' is placed ?.</blockquote> <p>"regardless" is a rather strong word; if your scripts should really find their project directory on their own, without any helping assumptions or config files, they'd have to recursively search all directories -- in general that's a very bad idea.</p> <p>I know several approaches that some programs out there in the wild take (and often they take several of those in combination), listed in no particular order: <ul> <li>Assume that the current working directory is the project dir</li> <li>Search the current directory and all of its parents for special files/directories. For example git, the distributed version control system, does that for finding repositories</li> <li>Search in hard-coded places</li> <li>Search for config files in hard-coded places, and read them to determine where to go</li> <li>Search in directories relative to your home directory</li> <li>Search relatively to the installation path of the binary</li> <li>Use environment variables and/or command line options to find project dirs.</li> </ul> <p>In the end, it all depends on what you want, and on the usualy work flow. Maybe you like some of the options I've listed.</p> <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-616540"> [http://perl6.org/|Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed] </div></div> 999160 999160