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From: hakanson@ogicse.ogi.edu (Marion Hakanson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: How to find working directory?
Message-ID: <11208@ogicse.ogi.edu>
Date: 8 Aug 90 22:52:32 GMT
References: <139945@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <8974@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Organization: Oregon Graduate Institute (formerly OGC), Beaverton, OR
Lines: 24

In article <8974@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV> lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) writes:
>In article <139945@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> petolino@joe.Eng.Sun.COM (Joe Petolino) writes:
>: I know I can change my working directory with chdir(<string>).  Is there a 
>: symmetrical operation which tells me what my working directory is (short
>: of invoking pwd in a subshell, that is)?
>
>No.

This has bugged me for a long time.  You've got rmdir and mkdir, which
are implemented by running the corresponding commands, on systems
which don't have rmdir(2) and mkdir(2).  Why not provide the same kind
of uniform access to getwd?  Use the system call if it's there, and
run "pwd" for the user if it's not.  After all, isn't one of the
points of Perl's existence to provide a uniform interface to various
systems?  Suppose I want to port my Perl script to a machine that
doesn't have a pwd command (like DOS or some such)?

I've asked for this before.  I've also asked for a gethostname interface
to the various "uname/hostname/gethostname" system calls, too.  And
ctime(3) and getfsent(3), etc.  You can't always get what you want....

-- 
Marion Hakanson         Domain: hakanson@cse.ogi.edu
                        UUCP  : {hp-pcd,tektronix}!ogicse!hakanson