Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!guido
From: guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Full path name of a file
Message-ID: <304@piring.cwi.nl>
Date: 8 May 88 10:28:22 GMT
References: <2532@chalmers.UUCP> <301@piring.cwi.nl>
Reply-To: guido@cwi.nl (Guido van Rossum)
Organization: The Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Amoebae
Lines: 21

I posted a routine to get the full pathname of a file.  It had been
working for some months.  But it still contained a bug, which became
apparent when I switched from MPW to LightspeedC this weekend.  The
parameter to getdirname should be an int, not a long!

Also I can now tell you what include files you need for LSC:
	#include 
	#define NULL 0

Note that it is perfectly legal for a Macintosh owner to create a
directory hierarchy where the length of full path names of the deepest
files exceeds 255 bytes; since the file system never manipulates full
pathnames internally (it only ever sees them when passed as parameters),
it doesn't and needn't check.  However, this poses an ethical problem if
you are constructing full pathnames: my code simply bombs if it would
construct a pathname >255 bytes, and if I increased the buffer size, the
resulting pathnames are useless except for documentation purposes (since
the file system can't have string parameters >255 bytes).
--
Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam
guido@piring.cwi.nl or mcvax!piring!guido or guido%piring.cwi.nl@uunet.uu.net