Re: Re: Writing journal and output file to current directory

[John Darrington]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 10:54:03AM +0200, unknown-1 wrote:
     >If running a program sets the current directory to the program's
     >installation directory, then the natural question is: What is a
     >good default place to put PSPP's output files?
     
     Some points of view. Possible places:
     a) the temp directory
     b) the home directory
     c) the directory where the datafile is stored
     Some thoughts about it.
     c) may be not available because the data is not saved at that moment
     b) could be. Although creating "Application Data/PSPP " and placing them
     there seems to be more Windows like. Anything would the home directory has
     to be checked as I beleave Microsoft changed something with this in Vista.
     a) looks somehow the easiest but there are objections against.
     
     Following the Unix way, it should be B. (or the B+ as described above)
     

Coming from a unix background, I really expect programs to dump their
output in the current directory (not the home directory) unless
otherwise instructed.  I mean it would be crazy if I did:
 cd ~/thesis/chapter2/section3 ; latex draft35.tex
and the dvi file got dumped into ~/draft35.dvi

However, if this would make sense to windows users then I think we
could make a conditionally compiled get_default_output_dir function to
keep them  happy.

J'


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