Talin wrote:
That's true of textual paths in general - i.e. even on unix, textual paths aren't guaranteed to be unique or exist.
What I mean is that it's possible for two different files to have the same pathname (since you can mount two volumes with identical names at the same time, or for a file to exist on disk yet not be accessible via any pathname (because it would exceed 255 characters). I'm not aware of any analogous situations in unix.
Its been a while since I used classic MacOS - how do you handle things like configuration files with path names in them?
True native classic MacOS software generally doesn't use pathnames. Things like textual config files are really a foreign concept to it. If you wanted to store config info, you'd probably store an alias, which points at the moral equivalent of the files inode number, and use a GUI for editing it. However all this is probably not very relevant now, since as far as I know, classic MacOS is no longer supported in current Python versions. I'm just pointing out that the flexibility would be there if any similarly offbeat platform needed to be supported in the future.
# Or you can just use a format specifier for PEP 3101 string format: print "Path in local system format is {0}".format( entry ) print "Path in NT format is {0:NT}".format( entry ) print "Path in OS X format is {0:OSX}".format( entry )
I don't think that expressing one platform's pathnames in the format of another is something you can do in general, e.g. going from Windows to Unix, what do you do with the drive letter? You can only really do it if you have some sort of network file system connection, and then you need more information than just the path in order to do the translation. -- Greg