Is there a way in Windows 7 to create a directory that has as its virtual contents all the files and folders from 2 other actual directories?
I'm hoping I can define a single dir that reflects the contents of 2 other dirs via symblinks or something without having to copy files.
*edit: I need to be able to specify the combining dir as a filepath. Looks like using a library doesn't let me do this.
c:\actualdir1\ a,b
c:\actualdir2\ c,d
c:\virtualdir\ a,b,c,d
thanks
Seems like libraries would be perfect for this. You can create a library and add folders to it from code, then use the library almost anywhere you would use a folder. You don't mention what language you want to use - for managed code the Windows API Code Pack has some wrappers for the shell stuff, and from C++ you can use shell APIs.
(If you're asking as a user then the answer is still libraries, but the question is offtopic and belongs on SuperUser.)
No, I don't think this is possible without writing your own Shell Extension. However, depending on what you are looking for, perhaps using Windows 7 Libraries would do the trick.
Related
Is there a way to tell if a folder is shared For example I have folder D:/data1 I would like to know if it is shared or if is not. Is this possible to do with golang or CMD commands? Is there a example on how to do this?
My goal is to be able to pass in a root folder D:/data2 and tell if is a shared folder.
Example of what i would like to do.
if shared("D:/data2") {
//handle if it is shared
} else {
//handle not shared folder
}
I just have not bin able to find a way to detect if the folder is shared.
Thank you for your help!
Disclaimer: I'm far from a windows cli expert.
You're on the right path in terms of os/exec.Cmd to execute OS specific commands on your target system.
You should be able to use the net share command to display all current local shares. Unfortunately while you can check a sharename with that command too, there doesn't appear to be any reverse lookup, so you'll probably have to write some code that can poke through the results of net share and look for the relevant path.
The output is formatted nicely enough, so it shouldn't be that difficult to write a function that uses net share to create a map of all windows shares for easy look up.
The C# solution to this problem is to use WMI. Since this is very Windows-specific, I don't believe anything out of the Go standard library will help you here.
We can see in this answer that a third-party package does exist for using WMI, as well as another package from Stack Exchange. You can try to make something out of the combination of the C# solution and the API available with those WMI packages.
I'm on OS-X (Mavericks, if that matters), and I'm making a bash script that will use resources from a folder called "templates". I'm trying to figure out where I should put it (the templates folder). I'd like to make it so the user doesn't need to modify their path when they install it, so I'd rather not do it the way the terminal mysql command does it (it lives in a folder in /usr/local/mysql/bin). I really want to be able to put them into usr/bin, but I don't know if it's "polite" to put folders in there (I don't see any in there).
Right now I'm leaning towards putting the scripts in usr/bin and having the templates in usr/lib. Is that how this type of thing is normally done, or is there another way? I'd like to follow a convention, assuming there is one. I'd also like it to apply to as many Unix platforms as possible (I'd like to put in a directory where bash scripts live that's consistent across as many Unix platforms as possible). Thanks.
If you follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS), your executable goes in /usr/local/bin, while read-only template files go in /usr/local/share/YOURAPP/. To quote the FHS:
/usr/local/share
The requirements for the contents of this directory are the same as /usr/share. […]
and:
The /usr/share hierarchy is for all read-only architecture independent data files.
(Emphasis added)
If the system admin is meant to customize the template files to take effect system-wide, then they would simply go in /etc/YOURAPP/templates (or something like that).
If the template files are customized on a per-user basis, then the modified copies of the templates (copied from /usr/local/share/YOURAPP/templates) need to be saved in the user's directory, under $HOME/.config/YOURAPP/templates or something like that (thanks to technosaurus for the correction).
You mentioned that you want to install the templates in a directory alongside your executable. That is not the standard approach on UNIX, at least going by the FHS. If you really want to go this route, there is a sort of convention of installing your app to /opt/YOURAPP/, using whatever organization you want inside that folder.
In all cases, it is not good practice to install executables directly to /usr/bin, as that directory is considered to be under the exclusive control of the OS/distribution. If you want to install there, the accepted way to do that is to create a package for the package manager of every supported OS/distribution.
What I need is a directory which the user can handle as a single file in the Windows explorer. Does something like this exist? If not, what comes closest?
The closest thing is probably Alternate Data Streams, although those are more akin to MacOS Named Forks than Bundles.
There are also some special cases, for example if you save a website with Internet Explorer you get an HTML file and a folder which are linked together.
Depends on your particular needs. As mentioned above, named streams are possible (on NTFS), however you should notice that not all applications copy files with named streams correctly. In some scenarios regular ZIP archives can work (Explorer shows them as folders). If you are doing software development, there exist libraries that let you store many files in one container file (eg. SolFS).
I think you can create a folder with an extension, e.g. Myfolder.bundle, then you can associate that extension with a custom icon. So it looks like a bundle as far as the end user is concerned.
I have a VisualStudio project with a few sub folders like Accounting, Store etc. I need to make a duplicate of the "Accounting" folder and also rename all the Class Objects in that folder. Each object in that folder is prefixed with "Accounting".
Basically I want to name the duplicate "Customer" and change all the prefix of the Class Objects to Customer..
What's the fastest way in doing this?
The fastest way to do this is probably the Unix command line tools. (On Windows, you can install, e.g., MSys or Cygwin to use them.) If you haven't done this, however, it will take quite a while to set this up and get familiar with them.
Here on my Windows box I would probably use a combination of TotalCommander (for file copying and batch file renaming) and VS itself (for batch identifier replacement).
I have, however, never come into the situation to do this, since, in general, I shy away from code duplication. Have you asked yourself why you're doing this and whether there's a better way? If the code duplication is so massive that it's worth the time asking us how to do it the fastest way, this isn't just a code smell. That's a dead skunk decaying under your pillow.
I'd suggest that you copy the folders using Windows Explorer and use a tool like notepad++ or TextPad to rename multiple files.
You can use a macro to rename the classes and the file names. If the solution is bound to Visual Source Safe, it will pickup the file rename. More info and code example on http://tseonet.blogspot.com/2010/12/using-macros-in-visual-studio-to-rename.html.
I have a program that I need to run under *nix and windows. because the program takes file paths from files the issue is what to do about the \ vs / issue.
My current thought is to put in a regex that converts the wrong one to the right one depending on what system I'm on. This will have the effect of letting either type work on either system. Aside from the fact that now I have two problems, does anyone see any other problems?
(Other better solutions are more than welcome)
Edit: the primary issue is getting windows paths to work on unix rather than the other way around.
The / is fully supported in win32 too.
Also see this related question
Windows will generally accept either \ or /,so standardizing on / may make your problem simpler as long as you have complete control over the filenames.
Have you considered creating a "file manager" class that will handle all of the file pathing issues for you? That way in your mail application, when you're loading a data file, you can call something like this.
LoadApplicationData(FileManager.GetDataFilePath)
Then your file manager will detect the environment that it is in and return the proper file path option. That way you can also accomodate for Win32 vs. Unix locatio standards (like Program Files vs /usr or whatever) as well.
Note that Win32 paths are complex when you consider drive letters (no analog on Unix) and the special 'forks' (MacOS pre-X term - likewise no analog on Unix in general, though MacOS X has them - surprise, surprise) that can be provided. Be careful.
Create a parser for your input to create a tree structure of nodes representing directories. Then you can 'save' by walking the tree and writing whatever delimiters you want or optionally doing different things, like checking if the directory exists or writing meta files. This is actually something that I am just now thinking would be useful for my own application :-)
You didn't say what language you are using, so I'm going to selfishly assume c/c++. boost, if you are willing to use it, has a filesystem library. Of course, if you are using a dynamic language, FS abstraction libraries probably already exist there too (e.g. in perl, File::Spec is quite standard).
You haven't told us what sort of files you are reading paths in from. I am going to assume that they are config files. In which case, there are many ways, IMHO the correct answer is to design your program to avoid manipulating paths, if possible. I posted an answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/40980510/2345997 which is relevant.
ways:
Add a command line option which allows a user to specify the path in question instead of reading it from a config file.
Add a command line option so that the user can specify a base path. Paths in the config file will be interpreted as located under this base path.
Split your config file into three. One file will have cross platform configuration, another file will have windows only configuration and a final file will have Linux only configuration. Then the user can specify the correct path for both Windows and Linux. On windows your program will read the cross-platform config file and the windows only config file. On Linux it will read the cross-platform file and the Linux only config file.
Add preprocessing to your config file parsing. This will allow you to have one config file where the user can make your program ignore some of the lines in the file depending on which OS the program is running on. Therefore, the user will be able to specify the path to the file twice. Once for Linux, and once for Windows.
Change the design so that the files are always located in the same directory as your executable - then the user only specifies file names in the config file rather than paths to files.
Use a simple function that switches "/" to "\". Then document to the user that they must specify paths as Linux paths and this transformation will be applied for windows.
Create your own path mini-language for this and document it to the user. E.g: "/" - specifies a directory separator, {root} - expands to the root of the filesystem, {cwd} - expands to the current directory, {app} - expands to the path to your application etc... Then the user can specify file paths like: {root}/myfiles/bob.txt on both platforms.
Some paths will work on both platforms. E.g: relative paths like ../my files/bill.txt. Restrict your application to only work with these paths. Document this limitation and how your application handles paths to the user.