🚀 go-pugleaf

ahmed@cloudburst.seas.ucla.edu (Ahmed A. Jaffer) writes:
>martian (martian@martian.demon.co.uk) wrote:
>>ahmed@cloudburst.seas.ucla.edu "Ahmed A. Jaffer" writes:
>
>> Try     if exist d:\path\nul goto success
>> to test for the existence of d:\path
>
>Unfortunately, this does NOT always work.  The problem involves having some
>(usually network) drivers loaded in memory, which hinder the performance of
>the batch-only-style test (alwyas true/always false). CD-ROM drives can cause
>problems as well, due to their alternate directory layout (i.e. no FAT).  The
>program existdir.exe solves this problem, or, at least, hasn't failed so far!

A further way of determining the existence of a directory can be based
on whether or not there is any output produced by DIR /B

dir /B %1 >tmp1
copy tmp1 tmp2 >\nul
if not exist tmp2 echo DIRECTORY NOT FOUND

This is based on DIR /B producing no output when a directory does not exist.
In practice, the above will need to be preceded by: if exist tmp2 del tmp2
and the temporary files subsequently cleaned up by something like del tmp?

A \full\pathname, if non-existent, causes DIR to write an error message
to CON; so unless tests can be confined to subdirectories only, the DIR
command will need to be bracketed by the CTTY NUL - CTTY CON pair.

I don't know how this method will acquit itself on CD-ROM drives, though.
--
John Savage               koala@sydney.dialix.com.au