Cross platform method for getting the /actual/ contents of a directory
Hello, I'm writing a function to find out if a given directory is empty. I came up with the obvious: do{ contents <- getDirectoryContents "/home/timothy/works/current/anonGraph/ empty/" ; let realContents = filter (\file -> case file of "." -> False ; ".." -> False ; _ -> True) contents in return $ case realContents of [] -> True ; _ -> False} And this works fine on linux, but I wonder. On other systems, is "." and ". ." allowed as file names? Couldn't a windows user actually end up with a file name named "." and this method would fail? Thank you Timothy
On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 2:16 PM,
And this works fine on linux, but I wonder. On other systems, is "." and ".." allowed as file names? Couldn't a windows user actually end up with a file name named "." and this method would fail?
Windows treats dots in filenames specially as well, although differently specially. I am not sure about . but .. certainly works on Windows if you're not in the drive's root. There are some other situations where dots in names are rejected (two or more in a row, other than .. itself, IIRC?) because of backward compatibility. -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates allbery.b@gmail.com ballbery@sinenomine.net unix/linux, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure http://sinenomine.net
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