[boost] Re: dir_it library on Windows

From: Dietmar Kuehl (dietmar.kuehl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-01-12 10:53:11

Hi,
At 10:02 AM 1/12/00 -0500, Beman Dawes <beman_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>There may have been some changes in behavior between versions.  IIRC,
>one thing that gets changed if you install IE (and probably some
>other MS software) is that entering a filename at the command line
>fires off the program associated with that filename.  So if you enter
>"foo.html", your default browser gets invoked on the file foo.html.
>This works within programs, too, and I use it inside a VC++ addin I
>wrote to invoke the browser on URL's in comment lines.  So the
>definition of executable file blurs even further.

I thought about this stuff too and basically it says that anything with
an extension might be executable depending on the software the user
has installed. As a consequence, I don't think that it makes much sense
to provide access to an executable flag in the way I have done so far.
Unless somebody knows a suitable system call determining whether
a file is executable, I will drop support for this flag for Win32 platforms.

The other changes and fixes I'm planning to built into the next release.
There is another change I want to make to this stuff namely support
of some sort of file identification. This would be used for two rather
separate purposes:

- On systems with different drives like eg. Macs to determine the correct
  file/directory on the correct drive. A corresponding identifaction would
  be used as a constructor argument to the directory iterator.

- Determine the file attributes for just one file as opposed to a file from
  a directory. Currently the directory iterator can be used for this purpose
  only be iterating to the corresponding file.

There are still some implementation and design details open, eg. whether
the directory iterator and the file identification share a common base
class. If anybody has ideas or thoughts these are definitely welcome.

I hope to find the time to implement and document this stuff until the
end of this week.

Regards,
  dk