Finding the path to a file

[Anand Pillai]

One way to do this is to specify an environment
variable similar to PYTHONPATH for your application.
It will be the place where the program should search
for the config file.

On unix, one user would use it as follows.

Egs: % export MYCONFIGPATH="/etc:/usr/local/etc:/home/someuser/:
              /home/soomeuser/program"

In your program, look for the config file first in cwd
. If you cannot find it look up this env variable from
the shell using os.environ.get() and walk through the
paths using os.path.walk() to look for your cfg file.
I suggest os.path.walk() as it can recurse the sub-paths
too.

It reminds me, I have to add similar functionality for
harvestman.

Anand

Todd Johnson <overdrive_ss at yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.1060643598.28429.python-list at python.org>...
> Hey,
> 
> I have been working on a program that stores
> information for each user in a subdirectory of the
> directory in which the script is run. So if my script
> is in /home/someuser/myprogram, the config files and
> such are in /home/someuser/myprogram/config. Now if I
> invoke the interpreter from the same directory as the
> script is in I can load and save the files because cwd
> points to that directory(I used cwd to get the path
> and then add /config to it to get to the proper
> directory)
> 
> My problem is that if I invoke it with a command like
> python /home/someuser/myprogram but I am in
> /home/someuser, cwd does not point to the scripts
> directory but to the directory the interpreter was
> invoked from. This means I don't know how to find the
> config files other than making them hard coded to a
> certain directory. I don't want to hard code them
> however so that the program can be contained in one
> directory and easily removed and I also don't want to
> have to specify where a user installs the program. 
> 
> So basically, I want to know how to find the directory
> my script is in, even when it is invoked from another
> directory. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Todd A. Johnson
> 
> =====
> The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.  II Corinthians 13:14
> 
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