Re: [Chicken-users] file-exists? on Windows

[Kon Lovett]

On May 14, 2007, at 11:28 AM, John Cowan wrote:

> Mario Domenech Goulart scripsit:
>
> > Isn't (file-exists? ".\\") supposed to return ".\\" on windows?
>
> Ah.  No.  The Win32 kernel does *not* ignore trailing backslashes the
> way the Unix kernel ignores trailing slashes -- instead, it returns
> file-not-found errors.

This comes down to a question of platform abstraction. Which I  
suspect is the unspoken point of Mario's. We do need to remember that  
whatever their compatibility layers/modes Win32 & MacOS X are not  
unix. But Chicken does seem to have a bent for providing a common  
filesystem view so '(file-exists? ".\\")' probably should work on  
Windows, with a little help from special case handling.

> Note also that the root directory of a Win32 volume does not contain
> "." or ".." files (Cygwin fakes them), so it is not even fully  
> reliable
> to ask if "." exists.

Since I use MinGW I think I link w/ the system dlls so the '_stat'  
implementation is native. I does appear to handle "." & ".."  
pathnames "correctly", given your point about the trailing directory  
separator above.

> --
> By Elbereth and Luthien the Fair, you shall     address@hidden
> have neither the Ring nor me!  --Frodo          http://www.ccil.org/ 
> ~cowan
>
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