Re: Proposal: an addition to glib for getting the absolute path of the current binary.

[John Cupitt <john cupitt ng-london org uk>]

Mike Hearn wrote:
> It would be nice if glib could provide something like the following API:
>
> gboolean g_get_absolute_path(gchar *fallback, gchar **out);
>
> which takes a fallback string (typically would be the PREFIX macro as
> defined by the build system on UNIX) and a pointer to a pointer which is
> set either to be g_strdup(fallback) on systems where this information is
> not available, or the absolute path of the calling module on systems where
> it is.

I this this is a great idea, I've had to make my own (rather poor) equivalent several times in the past. A high-quality glib version would be great. 

I'd vote for PATH searching to go in there too, although I realise it can be unreliable.

A related issue is embedding environment variables in data files so they can refer to other data files. How about adding something to glib which could expand environment variables in a string?

John