EDIT
The existed directory is not necessarily a sub-directory of the home directory. It can be a sub-directory of a sub-directory of the home directory.
End of EDIT
I am reading a user input (e.g., cd existedDirectory) to change the current directory to the "existedDirectory". I know that
chdir(getenv("HOME"));
can change the current directory to home directory, so I tried the following methods:
chdir(getenv("/existedDirectory"));
chdir(getenv("existedDirectory"));
chdir(getenv("~/existedDirectory"));
chdir("/existedDirectory");
chdir("existedDirectory");
chdir("~/existedDirectory");
Nothing worked. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
chdir takes a string argument with a path to change to. It does no other special handling (environment vars or home or anything else), so you if you want any of those things, you need to build a string to pass into it.
chdir("/existingDirectory");
which change to and existing directory in the root directory -- it has an absolute path. So it has to be one of the directories you see when you run ls /.
chdir("exisitingDirectory");
will change to an existing subdirectory of the current director.
If you want to change to a subdirectory of your home directory, you need something like:
char path[PATH_MAX];
sprintf(path, "%s/%s", getenv("HOME"), "subdir");
chdir(path);
chdir() in C only affects the process, which calls it. Your shell and your program are two different processes, which run separately. So, the environmental variable $PWD, which indicates the working directory, will only be changed for your application. Check this resource, too.
Note:chdir() doesn’t change the working directory of current shell. Because when the program is executed in the shell, the shell follows fork on exec mechanism. So, it doesn’t affect the current shell.
When running scripts in bash, I have to write ./ in the beginning:
$ ./manage.py syncdb
If I don't, I get an error message:
$ manage.py syncdb
-bash: manage.py: command not found
What is the reason for this? I thought . is an alias for current folder, and therefore these two calls should be equivalent.
I also don't understand why I don't need ./ when running applications, such as:
user:/home/user$ cd /usr/bin
user:/usr/bin$ git
(which runs without ./)
Because on Unix, usually, the current directory is not in $PATH.
When you type a command the shell looks up a list of directories, as specified by the PATH variable. The current directory is not in that list.
The reason for not having the current directory on that list is security.
Let's say you're root and go into another user's directory and type sl instead of ls. If the current directory is in PATH, the shell will try to execute the sl program in that directory (since there is no other sl program). That sl program might be malicious.
It works with ./ because POSIX specifies that a command name that contain a / will be used as a filename directly, suppressing a search in $PATH. You could have used full path for the exact same effect, but ./ is shorter and easier to write.
EDIT
That sl part was just an example. The directories in PATH are searched sequentially and when a match is made that program is executed. So, depending on how PATH looks, typing a normal command may or may not be enough to run the program in the current directory.
When bash interprets the command line, it looks for commands in locations described in the environment variable $PATH. To see it type:
echo $PATH
You will have some paths separated by colons. As you will see the current path . is usually not in $PATH. So Bash cannot find your command if it is in the current directory. You can change it by having:
PATH=$PATH:.
This line adds the current directory in $PATH so you can do:
manage.py syncdb
It is not recommended as it has security issue, plus you can have weird behaviours, as . varies upon the directory you are in :)
Avoid:
PATH=.:$PATH
As you can “mask” some standard command and open the door to security breach :)
Just my two cents.
Your script, when in your home directory will not be found when the shell looks at the $PATH environment variable to find your script.
The ./ says 'look in the current directory for my script rather than looking at all the directories specified in $PATH'.
When you include the '.' you are essentially giving the "full path" to the executable bash script, so your shell does not need to check your PATH variable. Without the '.' your shell will look in your PATH variable (which you can see by running echo $PATH to see if the command you typed lives in any of the folders on your PATH. If it doesn't (as is the case with manage.py) it says it can't find the file. It is considered bad practice to include the current directory on your PATH, which is explained reasonably well here: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part2/section-13.html
On *nix, unlike Windows, the current directory is usually not in your $PATH variable. So the current directory is not searched when executing commands. You don't need ./ for running applications because these applications are in your $PATH; most likely they are in /bin or /usr/bin.
This question already has some awesome answers, but I wanted to add that, if your executable is on the PATH, and you get very different outputs when you run
./executable
to the ones you get if you run
executable
(let's say you run into error messages with the one and not the other), then the problem could be that you have two different versions of the executable on your machine: one on the path, and the other not.
Check this by running
which executable
and
whereis executable
It fixed my issues...I had three versions of the executable, only one of which was compiled correctly for the environment.
Rationale for the / POSIX PATH rule
The rule was mentioned at: Why do you need ./ (dot-slash) before executable or script name to run it in bash? but I would like to explain why I think that is a good design in more detail.
First, an explicit full version of the rule is:
if the path contains / (e.g. ./someprog, /bin/someprog, ./bin/someprog): CWD is used and PATH isn't
if the path does not contain / (e.g. someprog): PATH is used and CWD isn't
Now, suppose that running:
someprog
would search:
relative to CWD first
relative to PATH after
Then, if you wanted to run /bin/someprog from your distro, and you did:
someprog
it would sometimes work, but others it would fail, because you might be in a directory that contains another unrelated someprog program.
Therefore, you would soon learn that this is not reliable, and you would end up always using absolute paths when you want to use PATH, therefore defeating the purpose of PATH.
This is also why having relative paths in your PATH is a really bad idea. I'm looking at you, node_modules/bin.
Conversely, suppose that running:
./someprog
Would search:
relative to PATH first
relative to CWD after
Then, if you just downloaded a script someprog from a git repository and wanted to run it from CWD, you would never be sure that this is the actual program that would run, because maybe your distro has a:
/bin/someprog
which is in you PATH from some package you installed after drinking too much after Christmas last year.
Therefore, once again, you would be forced to always run local scripts relative to CWD with full paths to know what you are running:
"$(pwd)/someprog"
which would be extremely annoying as well.
Another rule that you might be tempted to come up with would be:
relative paths use only PATH, absolute paths only CWD
but once again this forces users to always use absolute paths for non-PATH scripts with "$(pwd)/someprog".
The / path search rule offers a simple to remember solution to the about problem:
slash: don't use PATH
no slash: only use PATH
which makes it super easy to always know what you are running, by relying on the fact that files in the current directory can be expressed either as ./somefile or somefile, and so it gives special meaning to one of them.
Sometimes, is slightly annoying that you cannot search for some/prog relative to PATH, but I don't see a saner solution to this.
When the script is not in the Path its required to do so. For more info read http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/sect_02_01.html
All has great answer on the question, and yes this is only applicable when running it on the current directory not unless you include the absolute path. See my samples below.
Also, the (dot-slash) made sense to me when I've the command on the child folder tmp2 (/tmp/tmp2) and it uses (double dot-slash).
SAMPLE:
[fifiip-172-31-17-12 tmp]$ ./StackO.sh
Hello Stack Overflow
[fifi#ip-172-31-17-12 tmp]$ /tmp/StackO.sh
Hello Stack Overflow
[fifi#ip-172-31-17-12 tmp]$ mkdir tmp2
[fifi#ip-172-31-17-12 tmp]$ cd tmp2/
[fifi#ip-172-31-17-12 tmp2]$ ../StackO.sh
Hello Stack Overflow
Firstly, I want to start by using inotify to monitor a specific directory (the main directory) for files and sub-directories. If a new directory is added into this main directory, how would I make sure to monitor this sub-directory with inotify? How would I monitor a new directory within this sub-directory of the main directory?
I think adding it to the watch is easy by using the inotify_add_watch() function but I do not know how to get the correct relative path address of files and directories within sub-directories (to use for like Dropbox-like syncing in a different location while maintaining the correct directory tree, for example).
Well the fastest to implement (but not the fastest in reality) would be to:
Create the initial tree of directories by recursively exploring the children; An example in C/Linux can be found here:
http://www.lemoda.net/c/recursive-directory/
Add a watch for each subdirectory; When something has been modified or changed you can parse all children recursively and see the differences. Something similar was discussed here:
How to monitor a folder with all subfolders and files inside?
If this solution doesn't appeal to you, you might try to do a polling mechanism such that you must re-check the whole structure using a thread at a certain time interval.
Hope it helps!
I need to read file in my program so while providing path I want to give relative paths because all files to be opened will be in some folder within current folder.
I tried this:
FILE *f=fopen("./abc/p.txt","r")
abc is folder withing current folder, but fopen returns NULL. How to do this thing?
This comes from either one of those:
. or ./abc/ is not readable or traversable
./abc/p.txt is not readable
./abc/p.txt does not exist
./abc/p.txt is a broken link
Look at errno to know what's the real problem.
this will run:
FILE *f=fopen("...\\abc\\p.txt","r");
I have troubles with replacing file contents in my current project. I renamed a directory, and a lot of class names has been changed cause of this. A want to rename this classes with netbeans, but I cannot setup the file path pattern well.
The previous directory path was: Test/TestCase under Source Files, and the new path is Test/UnitTest. So I have to rename the TestCase word to UnitTest in my php files.
I tried with *.php, it works (of course it works...), but returns every php file in the project which contains that word, and I don't want to choose from circa half thousand files the right ones. The files of the unit test system could easily contain the TestCase word...
Tried out the following patterns, but they gave empty result:
Test\UnitTest\*.php
*Test\UnitTest\*.php
Test/UnitTest/*.php
*Test/UnitTest/*.php
Test/UnitTest/*
I have not a clue what I do wrong... I tried to search a tutorial for file search patterns but have found only regex patterns and those are definitely not what I was looking for. Can anybody help me?
Lol, I checked it again, and I realized, that I didn't notice the "scope" part last time. In that you can choose the current selection instead of the entire project. So the pattern matches only the file name, not the relative path of the file...
It was so obvious... This is an epic fail, I think I was too tired...