Re: emacs.exe --load FILE and current directory on w32

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2005 23:58:24 +0200
> From: Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman.073@student.lu.se>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Richard Stallman wrote:
> 
> >    Info says that the startup argujment load looks in the current directory 
> >    for the file to load. That does not seem to be correct, at least not on w32.
> >
> >Would you please provide a complete test case?
> >
> Yes, of course.
> 
> *** If we have loadme.el:
> (message "I am loaded, thank you!")
> **********************
> 
> This works:
> 
>     emacs.exe -batch -no-site-file -q somefile.txt -l loadme.el
>     I am loaded, thank you!
> 
> However when  somefile.txt is in another directory then it fails:
> 
>     emacs.exe -batch -no-site-file -q ..\somefile.txt -l loadme.el
>     Cannot open load file: loadme.el

I get the same behavior on GNU/Linux, both with the current CVS and
with Emacs 21.3.

I think Emacs always behaved like that.  The manual is simplifying a
bit: you will see in startup.el that we try to find the file in the
_default_ directory; if we visited a file before processing -l, that
is no longer the current directory, but rather the directory of the
visited file.  I'm not sure this subtlety needs to be documented,
except, perhaps in a footnote.