I have a file in my home directory:
~/abc.csv
I want to get the complete absolute path which would be:
/home/nishant/abs.csv
How do I get it?
I thought canonical would help, but for canonical to work, the file should exists, and the exists function on ~/abc.csv returns false.
This is not making the path absolute, nor making it canonical.
It's shell expansion of the ~ character. And it's not a feature in Boost Filesystem, as such.
You can code it yourself:
#include <boost/filesystem.hpp>
#include <iostream>
using boost::filesystem::path;
path expand(path p) {
char const* const home = getenv("HOME");
if (home == nullptr)
return p; // TODO handle as error?
auto s = p.generic_string<std::string>();
if (!s.empty() && s.find("~/") == 0u) {
return home + s.substr(1);
}
return p;
}
int main() {
path sample = "~/test.cpp";
std::cout << expand(sample) << "\n";
}
Which, on my system prints "/home/sehe/test.cpp"
