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000160_icon-group-sender _Tue Jun 7 16:31:18 1994.msg
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Tue, 7 Jun 1994 18:13:57 MST
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 94 16:31:18 PDT
From: eric@star-semi.com (Eric Armstrong)
Message-Id: <9406072331.AA07354@star-semi.com>
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Subject: library of file operations
Cc: icon-project@cs.arizona.edu
Status: R
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
Have been toying around with icon for a little bit now, and must say that
I am mostly loving it. My most recent effort was a little program to
add positive and negative numbers at the beginning of a line. Fun to program,
and quite simple, compared to what would be required in other languages.
Since I work on a Sun system, and have a 486 system at home, I see the
need for a library of system-independent file functions. For example, I
would like to see:
a. given a path, return size
b. given a path, return date & time of last modification
c. " " " " creation date & time
d. given a name, return path (search current dir, then search path)
e. generate file names in a directory (may already be in prog library)
f. identify type of file (directory, file, link)
g. file attributes (this is hard: permissions-structures differ a lot)
In some cases, systems without the requisite functionality could return an
appropriate value (ex1: if no concept of path, the function path(name) would
return name. ex2: if no modification time, return &null.) In other cases,
lowest-common denominator may be the only possiblity -- for example, only
"owner" permissions, since not all systems have permissions for group & world.
Although a function for any one system would not be so hard, making a function
that worked across all systems would be tough. Anyone have any ideas on this
issue, or have some libraries that would solve dos/unix part of the problem?
Thanks.
p.s. regarding last request on a way to handle bugs. Am currently evaluating
a GNU-based system, GNATs, that comes with a good recommendation. The
other interesting recommendation was Lotus NOTES. Both are reported to
substantially fill the requirements I specified.