Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!garfield!john13
From: john13@garfield.UUCP (John Russell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: The 1001 Paths
Keywords: none
Message-ID: <4587@garfield.UUCP>
Date: 15 Mar 88 04:24:47 GMT
Organization: CS Dept., Memorial U. of Newfoundland, St. John's
Lines: 22

Seems to me like the "set" command is the ideal way to deal with the idea
of multiple possible paths to any particular file. Manx supplies one with
their compiler, and ARP contains a (much, much smaller) freely redistributable
set command which is compatible with the Manx format.

So anyone writing applications is quite free to use this method, for instance
you can do something of the form

set FONTS=fonts:!fontdisk1:fonts/!wb:fonts/!dpaint:fonts/

and write a little parse routine to search all locations for any given file.
This isn't system-wide, but can certainly be added to new and old applications
alike. To the fellow that wanted include files searched for this way, this is
just the method that Manx uses. Of course it's up to the application to
support it, but then an "include file" is specific to a certain type of
application.

And depending on the sort of application you were writing, you could define
whether or not you would be presented with a requester for a disk in the
path, or if the disk wasn't mounted it would just be skipped.

John