Re: working with relative paths

[steves]

Relative paths should work with chdir, being relative to where you are when you run (not where the script is). Example from a Solaris Perl 5.8 system:

use strict;
use Cwd;
print "cwd [1] = ", cwd(), "\n";
chdir("/tmp");
print "cwd [2] = ", cwd(), "\n";
chdir("steve"); # relative!
print "cwd [3] = ", cwd(), "\n";

produces:

cwd [1] = /export/home/foo
cwd [2] = /tmp
cwd [3] = /tmp/steve

[apotheon]

Maybe it "should" work (at least I think so), but the problem is that it doesn't. I'm beginning to wonder if it's some kind of system configuration issue. Is there any reason chdir() would work differently for a scalar variable than for hardcoded paths? Obviously, I'm trying to make a script that works for more than one filepath without having to rewrite the script every time.

[itub]

chdir has to work or I'll eat my hat, ;-) as it is one of the most fundamental functions. Perhaps if you posted a short but complete example, along with its actual output and the expected result, it would be easier to figure out what's going on.

A couple of tricks that might help: use strict, warnings, and diagnostics; try chdir $direct or die $! to see if there is an error message.

[apotheon]

First, the code I just used:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my ($direct);
chomp($direct = $ARGV[0]);
shift @ARGV;
chdir($direct) || die "failed to change to directory: $!";
opendir(WORKDIR,$direct) || die "failed to open directory: $!";
closedir(WORKDIR) || die "failed to close directory: $!";

Next, the output:

username@computer:~$ perl testchdir.pl music
failed to open directory: No such file or directory at testchdir.pl li
+ne 9.
username@computer:~$