File handling

When building an application which may be used under different environments, one difficulty is coping with documents which may be moved to different directories on other machines. Saving a file which has pointers to full pathnames is going to be inherently unportable. One approach is to store filenames on their own, with no directory information. The application searches through a number of locally defined directories to find the file. To support this, the class wxPathList makes adding directories and searching for files easy, and the global function wxFileNameFromPath allows the application to strip off the filename from the path if the filename must be stored. This has undesirable ramifications for people who have documents of the same name in different directories.

As regards the limitations of DOS 8+3 single-case filenames versus unrestricted Unix filenames, the best solution is to use DOS filenames for your application, and also for document filenames if the user is likely to be switching platforms regularly. Obviously this latter choice is up to the application user to decide. Some programs (such as YACC and LEX) generate filenames incompatible with DOS; the best solution here is to have your Unix makefile rename the generated files to something more compatible before transferring the source to DOS. Transferring DOS files to Unix is no problem, of course, apart from EOL conversion for which there should be a utility available (such as dos2unix).

See also the File Functions section of the reference manual for descriptions of miscellaneous file handling functions.