On Wed, 14 May 2008, Mark Taylor wrote:
> excellent - USERPROFILE sounds like exactly what we need then. It should be
> easy to implement like that, without requiring too
> much system-dependent code, in any sensible language.
Having said that: I note for reference here that there is an issue with implementing this in java. This is related to java bug 4787931:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4787931
Although you'd expect that the user.home system property in java would point to USERPROFILE under Windows, it does not (at least up till java 1.6). So you have to use the (deprecated) System.getenv() method instead and retrieve USERPROFILE directly. Unfortunately, at java 1.4 getenv is not only deprecated but also unimplemented (it throws a java.lang.Error). For later versions (1.5 and 1.6), happily, getenv works again. This means that it is basically impossible to obtain the value of USERPROFILE if you are running java 1.4 on Windows. In this case probably the best thing you can do is to use the value of user.home, which may or may not give you the right answer.
I don't think there's much that we can do about this - the only alternative really would be to define the home directory to be the value of Java's user.home system property, but that would be a java-centric solution to a java bug, and I'm certainly not advocating it.
Is it worth noting this issue (and perhaps providing a snippet of java boilerplate for how to locate the home directory) in the Standard Profile section of the document, or would that be cluttering it too much with language-dependent details?
Mark
-- Mark Taylor Astronomical Programmer Physics, Bristol University, UK m.b.taylor@bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/Received on 2008-05-14Z11:11:33