Re: How to get the preferred environment variable path separator?

[Alex Vong <alexvong1995@gmail.com>]

"Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:

> On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 6:00 AM, Alex Vong <alexvong1995@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Chris Marusich <cmmarusich@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Info node "(guile) File System" describes a procedure for getting the
>>> preferred file name separator of the operating system:
>>>
>>>  -- Scheme Variable: file-name-separator-string
>>>      The preferred file name separator.
>>>
>>>      Note that on MinGW builds for Windows, both ‘/’ and ‘\’ are valid
>>>      separators.  Thus, programs should not assume that
>>>      ‘file-name-separator-string’ is the _only_ file name
>>>      separator—e.g., when extracting the components of a file name.
>>>
>>>
>>> Is there an equivalent procedure for getting the preferred environment
>>> variable path separator, too?  I would expect such a procedure to return
>>> the ":" string (or does it return a character?) on most GNU/Linux
>>> distributions, since that is the separator e.g. for the PATH environment
>>> variable.
>>>
>> I can't find one either. If the machine has perl/python, you could try
>>   (use-modules (ice-9 rdelim) (ice-9 popen))
>>   (read-line (open-pipe* OPEN_READ
>>                          "perl"
>>                          "-e"
>>                          "use Config; print $Config{path_sep}"))
>> or
>>   (use-modules (ice-9 rdelim) (ice-9 popen))
>>   (read-line (open-pipe* OPEN_READ
>>                          "python"
>>                          "-c"
>>                          "import os; print(os.pathsep)"))
>
> Please don't do this.  Use file-name-separator-string.  Section 7.2.3
> in the manual, titled "File System".  In Emacs, you can press 'i' to
> search the manual for identifiers.
>
> Another way of finding out things like this is to use the REPL:
>
> scheme@(guile-user)> ,a separator
> (guile): file-name-separator-string
> (guile): file-name-separator?    #<procedure file-name-separator? (c)>
> scheme@(guile-user)> file-name-separator-string
> $2 = "/"
>
I think Christ is asking for ":" instead of "/", do we have environment
path separator in Guile?
>
> - Dave