I needed a little script to read data out of windows-style .ini files. Searching my windows machine I found inifile.rb in this path:
C:\ruby\lib\ruby\site_ruby\1.8\vr\contrib\
it seems unnatural to add this path directly to my rubylib path as this will mean any other special units I want will need to be added.
so in my code I wrote this:
require 'vr/contrib/inifile'
ini = Inifile.new("file.ini")
puts ini.read("common","name","default name")
This worked, but also doesn't seem elegant for inclusion. There must be a better way to specify this in the code ?
I think inifile.rb is part of vruby, which, it appears, is "a GUI library on MS Windows for Ruby". Which is something I'd never come across, so thanks!
It looks like that path is going to be necessary unless you either add it to your main Windows PATH (possible overkill) or to your Ruby load path, which you can access via the slightly arcane $:
I hope that , if only perhaps a little...
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This is likely not a simple topic - I have researched this to the best of my abilities and realize that it is not supported in any typical fashion.
My goal is to enable something similar to .app files from OSX, where the application, as well as its user data, can exist in the same file. I imagine it would require writing a tool to manage this behaviour, but this question is more about how to achieve this in the Windows OS. I am quite flexible regarding the implementation details, but the more straightforward the behaviour, the better (i.e. avoiding copying or compressing/decompressing entire directories/archives at runtime would be ideal).
Approaches I have considered:
Find a way to get explorer to treat a directory as a file, so that it can be associated. I have found a way to get explorer to treat a directory as a control panel item, I have thus far been unable to find a way to use this to associate a custom program. See the infamous "godmode hack" for Windows (name a directory something to the effect of "GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}"). This one seems the most hopeful, but I'm at wits end trying to find information about creating a new association of this type.
Come up with some kind of archive format which can extract executable information to a temporary directory, launch this executable passing the archive as a commandline parameter. This seems like the ugliest solution, from a performance perspective. I would prefer a different solution if at all possible, one which doesn't involve making duplicates of the program or its data to run.
Find a way to associate a directory directly, though I have found no trace of this being supported in Windows, and I assume this is a dead-end.
Find a way to get an executable to include writeable embedded files. I have been unable to make any headway with this- I even tried a resource hacker approach, but obviously you cannot modify the assembly while its in use.
Tried to make a self-modifying JAR file with Java, but the route I took would add the JDK as a runtime requirement, which seems a bit overkill. Even then, it would be limited to Java, and I'm pretty sure it's not actually supposed to allow that in the first place.
Modify Windows Explorer. I shudder at the amount of work this would take, not to mention the at-best gray area it falls under legally. Perhaps there's a way to extend explorer to achieve this, I'm not sure.
A custom archive file. This seems like the most straightforward way to do it. But it would ideally need to be an archive format that has very little overhead for file I/O. Could even be some kind of virtual disk that gets mounted, but I am imagining that would be pretty heavy.
I would appreciate any insight that anyone has on this topic. I won't go into reasons as they are irrelevant to the question itself- I'm aware it is likely not the most practical solution to anything in particular. Consider it a novel pursuit.
It can be done by application virtualization,
Read this wikipedia page theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_application
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_virtualization
And two pages about software:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_ThinApp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_(software)
Windows 7 added the ability for a Desktop.ini file to add/change the folder verbs on a per-folder basis. Using that trick it is possible to create a "folders as applications" style setup.
Can I make a ruby file (e.g script.rb) unreadable to a user?
The file is on an Ubuntu (offline) machine. The user will use a local Sinatra app that will use some ruby files. I don't want the user to see the code in some of those files.
How can I do it?
EDIT:
Can I setup the project in a way that the user will be able to start the app but won't have access to specific files in it?
Thanks
Does that correspond to what you are searching for ?
chmod yourfile.rb 711
As I said in my comment it is literally almost impossible to hide the content of your ruby source file, many people try this in many different ways but it is almost always trivial to reverse engineer. There are some "suggestions" for making your code hidden but they never really work still, here are a few;
Obfuscation - The process of making your code executable but unreadable, using a tool like ProGuard for Java (there are ones for most major languages) will try to make your code a mess, and as unreadable as possible while still maintaining execution speed. Normally this consists of renaming variables, using strange characters and generally hiding, moving or wrapping functions in complicated structures.
Package the interpreter - You can use a tool like ocra to package the script up inside an executable with the interpreter and standard library, but anyone with even a tiny bit of experience in reverse engineering will be able to easily tear out the source code given a small amount of time
Write a custom interpreter - Now we are getting somewhere with making it harder. Writing a custom interpreter will allow you to compile your script to a "bytecode" that can then be executed. This is of course a very time consuming, expensive and incompatible solution when it comes to working with other code bases.
Write most of your code in C and then call out to it via extensions - Again this mostly moves the problem but its still there. It will take more time but anyone can easily pull apart the machine code of the C library you load in and bob is your uncle they have the source code.
Many more alternatives - This isn't a comprehensive list, I am probably missing a few ideas or suggestions.
As far as it goes making code unreadable is hard a better solution might just to be consider providing a licence agreement with your code. That way, someone reads or modifies the source file you can take them to court for a legal settlement.
Extract your code and its functionality to an external API. And then provide it as a service. This way you don't have to expose your source code to your 'users'.
all!
I noticed that Powershell, or more specifically, pasting and tab-completing within Powershell, was a lot slower on my machine after upgrading to v3 from v2. I opened up procmon to see what was going on, only to find out that every attempt to tab-complete or paste anything triggers Powershell to find various permutations of the file provided in the subject. I have some network folders in my $PATH and walking through those folders every time I paste something seems non-ideal.
It seems that this file allows Powershell to behave more like Bash. While this is absolutely FANTASTIC and I'm looking forward to abusing this feature in the very near future, is there any way to configure Powershell such that it only attempts to find this file in one directory?
Thanks!
PSConsoleHostReadLine is actually a function. If PoSH can't find a method, alias, or anything else executable with that name, it falls back to it's default 'cooked' readline with editing, etc.
To redefine it, create a function:
function PSConsoleHostReadline {
[Console]::Readline()
}
As written, this method disables editing, etc. Write your own insane magic to do whatever you wish.
I'm guessing it's searching all the extra locations due to Powershell 3 having "Module Auto Load" which checks for a function in all locations known in the ENV:PSModulePath, and auto-loads the module which contains said method.
This was an oversight in V3. V4 will only search for functions or aliases - it won't search for external exes when looking for PSConsoleHostReadline.
If you're looking for a bash like experience - check out https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine
With the environment variable %allusersprofile% I can get the directory where common settings are stored. But most programs store their settings in the sub-folder "anwendungsdaten" (German, application data). Is there a way to get the direct path to this folder? The problem is that its name is language dependent.
Thanks.
Not sure about what programming language you're using, so I'll assume the basic Windows api. In XP you can call SHGetFolderPath with CSIDL_COMMON_APPDATA as a parameter. It looks like Vista and 7 have a new set of functions that do the same thing, you'd probably want to call SHGetKnownFolderPath.
In Windows Forms, you can use the Application.UserAppDataPath property.
I can't see any direct way to get hold of this information directly. If nothing else comes up, the only thing that comes to mind is something hacky that will probably work in 99% of all cases:
Take %USERPROFILE%
Take %APPDATA%
Take %APPDATA% and replace %USERPROFILE% by null. The "rest" should be "/Application Data" or "/Anwendungsdaten" or whatever
Take %ALLUSERSPROFILE%
Add the result of step 3. to it
You should end up with the correct, localized path to the "Appdata" directory of the "All users" profile.
Note: This is untested and I have little experience in this field. But it might work.
I'm not aware of any direct way to get it, but if language is your concern then you could grab the end of %APPDATA%, from the last '\' symbol to the end of the string, and append that to %allusersprofile%.
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.