What's the perfect (OS independent) way of storing filepaths ?

[Duncan Booth]

Steven D'Aprano <steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> wrote:

> On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:40:32 +0000, Duncan Booth wrote:
> 
>> Steven D'Aprano <steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> wrote:
>> 
>>> In Linux, config files should go into:
>>> 
>>> ~/.<appname>/ or /etc/<appname>/
>>> 
>>> In Windows (which versions?) then should go into the Documents And
>>> Settings folder, where ever that is.
>>> 
>>> There's no single string which can represent both of these
>>> conventions! 
>> 
>> The first of those should do nicely for both Linux and Windows:
>> 
>>>>> os.path.normpath(os.path.expanduser('~/.appname'))
>> 'C:\\Documents and Settings\\Duncan\\.appname'
> 
> 
> Except Windows users will be wondering why they have a directory
> starting with '.' in their home directory. Dot to make files hidden is
> not AFAIK supported by Windows.
> 
The leading dot doesn't make the files hidden on Windows, but there's no 
reason why you can't create files/folders with a leading dot and many 
programs do just that. On the machine I'm on right now, 'dir .*' shows me:

 Directory of C:\Documents and Settings\Duncan

18/10/2008  15:48    <DIR>          .
18/10/2008  15:48    <DIR>          ..
22/09/2008  20:28                45 .appcfg_nag
30/07/2004  09:28               244 .bashrc
18/01/2007  10:50             6,783 .bash_history
11/06/2006  12:30    <DIR>          .borland
06/04/2004  15:43               365 .emacs-places
11/03/2004  12:34    <DIR>          .emacs.d
08/01/2007  19:35            30,390 .fonts.cache-1
03/05/2008  18:07    <DIR>          .gimp-2.0
14/01/2005  14:34    <DIR>          .idlerc
11/06/2006  12:36    <DIR>          .jbuilder2005
27/06/2005  12:44                 3 .leoID.txt
11/06/2006  12:43    <DIR>          .Nokia
11/06/2006  12:36    <DIR>          .primetime2005
11/06/2006  12:13    <DIR>          .qualitycentral
04/02/2004  12:24    <DIR>          .ssh
12/08/2004  14:30    <DIR>          .thumbnails
30/07/2004  14:11                49 .Xauthority
29/07/2004  16:25                12 .Xdefaults
29/07/2004  14:36    <DIR>          .xemacs
17/08/2006  09:19             2,869 .XWinrc

not to mention the thousands of .svn folders scattered across the rest of 
the system.