Ah, the joy of trying to do sensible things cross-platform for file names.

A point to add is that not all OS necessarily make any use of a 'current directory' - RISC OS for example does strictly speaking have a legacy idea of it but generally it was ignored for anything to do with desktop applications. I *think* early Mac OS (up to OS X probably) had the same view. After all, if you run squeak by double-clicking on an image file in a filer window, what is the meaning of CWD?

Most likely we settled on directory of the image file' as a good proxy since it was actually discoverable from information we already had on startup. It's a pain when using things like any of the all-in-ones of course.

In cases where we start a system via some form of script we might do some work and pass the desired home directory via DTLs nice new -doit option, which could allow the all-in-one scripts to set it to something more sensible than /Users/tim/Documents/Squeak/Squeak-5.0-All-in-One.app/Contents/Resources/ when /Users/tim/Documents/Squeak would seem more plausibly useful.

And as for the mess that can occur when playing with filenames ... yeah. I've tried to make it better in the past (like probably 1998 was the last time I got up enough enthusiasm to be thrown into that briar patch) but it really needs a complete rethink, rewrite and replacement. We have had, in deep history, long threads about how to tackle this, with ideas about checking for file properties (problem: they can change in the backgrouund due to other processes), file name rules (can vary file by file according to the filesystem mounted - is it FAT, FAT32, NTFS, ext4, zfs, ftp, adfs?), and on and on.

IIRC their *was* a big push for this that resulted in 'FilePath' or something remotely like that in name? Beuller? Anyone?

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- Has a pulse, but that's about all.