getcwd behaves inconsistent?

[Stephen Jones]

On Monday, 18 June 2012 at 20:53:27 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Kapps" <opantm2+spam at gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:jikemjmapclwcufpwnjz at forum.dlang.org...
>> On Sunday, 17 June 2012 at 22:39:00 UTC, Stephen Jones wrote:
>>> I recently switched from Eclipse to monoD and found that all 
>>> my code to images etc was invalid because getcwd returns the 
>>> directory that contains the main entry code in Eclipse, but 
>>> returns the directory that contains the executable in 
>>> MonoDevelop. Is there a universally consistent way of 
>>> accessing files?
>>
>> As mentioned, it is not reliable to use the current working 
>> directory for making a relative path absolute.
>>
>
> Right. "Current Working Directory" and "Directory of 
> Executable" should
> never be confused:
>
> - The working directory should be assumed to always be 
> different, as it's
> whatever directory the user just happens to be in when they run 
> your
> program.
>
> - If you want to load files that are relative to the exe's 
> path, then you
> need the directory of the executble. The working directory 
> won't help at
> all. Note that args[0] is *not* good for this either, as that 
> gets screwed
> up by symlinks and all sorts of other stuff. args[0] is 
> unreliable.
>
>> The approach I use is GetModuleFileNameA on Windows 
>> (GetModuleFileNameA(null, Buffer.ptr, MAX_PATH)) and 
>> readLinkPosix for /proc/self/exe on Linux 
>> (readLinkPosix("/proc/self/exe", Buffer.ptr, Buffer.length)).
>
> Yea, that's definitely the way to go. Here are ready-to-go 
> functions that
> should handle that on Windows, Linux and OSX (untested on OSX 
> as I don't
> have a working Mac, but theoretically *should* work):
>
> https://bitbucket.org/Abscissa/semitwistdtools/src/8123e04b593c/src/semitwist/util/io.d#cl-168
>
> (Ignore the commented out function - that's just a remenant 
> from the
> D1/Tango days, I should probably just delete that.)
>
> Use those functions like this:
>
> // Assuming the exe is "C:\Foo\Bar\App.exe"
> assert(getExec() == `C:\Foo\Bar\App.exe`);
> assert(getExecName() == `App.exe`);
> assert(getExecPath() == `C:\Foo\Bar\`);
>
> You should be able to rip those functions right out of that 
> file and plop
> them into any util module you have, just make sure you also 
> include these
> import lines:
>
> version(Win32)
>     import std.c.windows.windows;
> else version(OSX)
>     private extern(C) int _NSGetExecutablePath(char* buf, uint* 
> bufsize);
> else
>     import std.c.linux.linux;

That was what I was after. Thanks.