Re: Finding pvconv

On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 08:49:11PM -0800, Roger Binns wrote:
| >On Unix systems (linux and Mac OS X included), you should look in all
| >directories listed in os.environ['PATH'] unless you let users set the 
| >location
| >of the thing you are looking for in the preferences.
| 
| I don't care enough to do that (look in all of $PATH or have preferences).

It has a better chance of working on more systems, since that is the
way applications are supposed to be found.

Anyways :

def find_file_in_PATH(fname) :
    import os
    for dir in os.environ['PATH'].split(os.pathsep) :
        if os.path.exists(dir) and fname in os.listdir(dir) :
            return os.path.join( dir, fname )

pvconv = find_file_in_PATH( 'pvconv' )

This is python, not C!  'It is quite trivial to do the search.

(PS. you can do what you want with this code; I place no restrictions
or copyright on it)

| pvconv won't even work on many modern Linuxes (it was compiled with some
| random version of the C++ libraries).

Binary-only software generally sucks precisely because of this.  Isn't
there an OSS tool capable of doing the necessary conversion?

| And giving people too much choice never solves anything.

There is a such thing as "too much", but no choice at all is even
worse.

| That is one of the reasons Unix/Linux is annoying
| to use - you get way too many choices, and not enough sensible defaults.

Some applications and/or distributions have sensible defaults, some
others don't.

-D

-- 
There is not a righteous man on earth
    who does what is right and never sins.
        Ecclesiastes 7:20
 
www: http://dman13.dyndns.org/~dman/            jabber: [email protected]

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