| Subject: | inconsistent behaviour for missing path |
On linux (ubuntu 14.04 perl v5.18.2 Cwd 3.40):
$ perl -e "use Cwd qw(abs_path); use Data::Dumper; print Dumper abs_path('/i/see/no/path/here');"
$VAR1 = undef;
On win32 (win 7 pro x64, ActiveState perl v5.16.3 Cwd 3.47 (installed via CPAN)):
Show quoted text
>perl -e "use Cwd qw(abs_path); use Data::Dumper; print Dumper abs_path('/i/see/no/path/here');"
/i/see/no/path/here: No such file or directory at -e line 1.
In theory, for all platforms, abs_path on a missing file should return one of:
a) undef
b) an exception
c) the pathname if it did exist ie. the same as File::Spec::Functions::rel2abs($path,getcwd())
hmm... on the above linux box:
$ mkdir /tmp/foo
$ cd /tmp/foo
$ rmdir /tmp/foo
$ perl -e "use Cwd; use Data::Dumper; print Dumper getcwd();"
$VAR1 = undef;
$ perl -e "use Cwd; use Data::Dumper; print Dumper cwd();"
/bin/pwd: couldn't find directory entry in ‘..’ with matching i-node
$VAR1 = '';
My preference would be for returning undef in all cases when the candidate path doesn't exist; though knowing the value of the absolute path that would result from creating the candidate file is useful too.
I've been looking at this mostly because App::perlmv doesn't build on windows, as far as I can tell, partially because of the difference in behaviour of abs_path between platforms.