Pythonic Idiom For Searching An Include Path

[Nobody]

On Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:27:16 -0500, Tim Daneliuk wrote:

> Given a program 'foo' that takes a command line argument '-I
> includefile', I want to be able to look for 'includefile' in a path
> specified in an environment variable, 'FOOPATH'.
> 
> I'd like a semantic that says:
> 
>   "If 'includefile' contains one or more path separator characters,
>    ignore 'FOOPATH'. If it contains no path separators, look for it in
>    the paths specified by 'FOOPATH', beginning with the leftmost path
>    first."
> 
> Is there a standard Pythonic idiom for doing this or do I need to cook
> up my own.

There isn't an idiom.

There are a surprising number of choices for such a simple task, e.g.
whether the search path is used for relative paths containing a separator,
whether you stop at the first file which exists or the first file which
meets other criteria (e.g. suitable permissions), whether default
locations come first or last, what happens if a default location is
included in the search path, etc.