How to save initial configuration? (program installation)

[kyosohma at gmail.com]

On Jun 25, 10:02 am, Jason Zapman II <zapman... at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've written a program.  To install this program, I'm going to need to
> initialize some stuff for the users environment, specifically the name/
> location of an internal state file.
>
> Currently, I'm hard coding the location of this file, but that's in-
> elegant.  What I'd like to do is just ask the user, with a suggested
> default.
>
> My question is how do I save this answer?  It's kind of a chicken-and-
> egg problem.
>
> The only solution I've thought of is to write something that's self
> modifying, but that's ugly (go in, grep for this variable
> initialization, re-write that line with the new value, quit).  Is
> there a better way to do this?  There almost has to be...
>
> If not, are there some 'best practices' on how to do the self-
> modification?
>
> Thanks for any help;
> Jason

I would think you could pop-up some dialog when the program is first
run to ask where they want the file to be. On the first run though,
you can just have the config file located in the current working
directory with the script file itself. Then just move it or save a new
copy to the new location and delete the original.

Mike