Johan Tibell wrote:
getProgName is only useful in case you want to print the program name to the screen. You cannot actually use it to do anything interesting programmatically (like execv:ing the program.) I suggest we add getFullProgName which does the sensible thing of returning argv[0]. Here's an implementation:
getFullProgName :: IO String getFullProgName = alloca $ \ p_argc -> alloca $ \ p_argv -> do getFullProgArgv p_argc p_argv peek p_argv >>= peek >>= peekCString
foreign import ccall unsafe "getFullProgArgv" getFullProgArgv :: Ptr CInt -> Ptr (Ptr CString) -> IO ()
While getFullProgramName is a very useful function, I don't think that the proposed implementation is any good. -1 The trouble is that getFullProgramName needs to be portable across different platforms. If it works on UNIX platforms but not on any other platform (Windows? Android?), we will just end up with Haskell code that works correctly only on UNIX, and subtly breaks everywhere else. I don't think that this is a good idea. Also, the package http://hackage.haskell.org/package/executable-path provides a portable way to get the path of an executable. If more standardization is required, I would argue that we should include it in the Haskell Platform or integrate the source code into base. Best regards, Heinrich Apfelmus -- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com