🚀 go-pugleaf

     I have a few questions about HFS.  I was unable to find the answers to
these questions in the first four volumes of Inside Macintosh.  Any suggestions
you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
     One note: when I refer to a vRefNum, I am talking about the volume
reference number/drive number/working directory reference number that can
be used to help access a file.

1.   How can one determine the vRefNum of the application that is currently
     running, from within the application?

2.   If one creates temporary files, should they be in the same folder as
     the application, in the system folder, or somewhere else?  Is there
     a standard for this, or is it the application's choice?

3.   How do you store an absolute reference to a file: one that can be
     saved in a datafile and loaded the next time the application is run
     when different disks may be in each drive, new folders may have been
     created, etc?

4.   How do you find out the vRefNum of the system folder?  Is it BootDrive,
     or is BootDrive a reference to the root directory of the startup volume?

5.   How does one determine if the vRefNum returned by SFGetFile or
     GetAppFiles is a volume reference number or a working directory reference
     number?

6.   When an application starts up, are there any working directories?

7.   How does Launch know which volume to launch the application from?  I
     looked at the code for ExitToShell and noticed that it just does a
     Launch with the FinderName as the name, and does nothing as far as
     volumes.  Does that mean that an application must preserve the
     default volume?

     Thanks for you help.

						Ed Kresch

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