Re: Utility functions from gnome-libs

[Tim Janik <timj gtk org>]

On 3 Jul 2000, Owen Taylor wrote:

> 
> gnome-libs has a number of "should be in GLib" functions that
> it would be nice to to really move in GLib for GLib-2.0.
> 
> The main interesting functions are the following functions
> from gnome-utils.h:
> 
> enum {
> 	G_FILE_TEST_ISFILE=1<<0,
> 	G_FILE_TEST_ISLINK=1<<1,
> 	G_FILE_TEST_ISDIR=1<<2,
> 	G_FILE_TEST_EXISTS=(1<<0)|(1<<1)|(1<<2) /*any type of file*/
> };
> 
> gboolean g_file_test   (const char *filename, int test);
> gboolean g_file_exists (const char *filename);
> 
> (These might alternatively be called g_file_race() ;-), but 
> they are useful for a lot of things, and a note in the
> docs about security implications should be OK.)

no, that's not a good idea. instead, it'll probably not hurt to
simply implement g_file_test() in terms of:

typedef enum
{
  G_FILE_IS_FILE	= 1 << 0,
  G_FILE_IS_LINK	= 1 << 1,
  G_FILE_IS_DIR		= 1 << 2,
  G_FILE_EXISTS		= G_FILE_IS_FILE | G_FILE_IS_LINK | G_FILE_IS_DIR
} GFileType;

GFileType g_file_test (const char *filename);

> /* locate a program in $PATH, or return NULL if not found */
> char *gnome_is_program_in_path (const gchar *program);
> 
> This would be renamed to g_is_program_in_path()

rather i'd call it g_find_program_in_path() since it
1) doesn't return a gboolean but a string
2) it can take quite some time to do all the path searching

> Regards,
>                                         Owen
> 

---
ciaoTJ