New conditionals for directories

[djspits]

ISREADABLE and ISWRITEABLE for directories. I have no preference for their names.

 

[Rodolfo]

And You might want to specify the name of another user, to see if the other user can reed/write into the directory.

Regards

Rodolfo Giovanninetti

 

[Alpengreis]

Good suggestion from both.

+1 from me!

 

[rconn]

Why would a directory not be readable?

 

[vefatica]

I don't know if readability is the right word, but there are a number of places (junctions) that you can get to (as CWD) in which you can't see anything.

What is the point of the numerous, seemingly badly behaved, junctions in one's profile directory? You can't enter them with Explorer, but you can with a command prompt. You can't read at the top level but if you know the names of things you canread sub directories.

 

[Charles Dye]

I suspect the OP is thinking about permissions.

 

[vefatica]

I suspect the OP is thinking about permissions.

I was talking about permissioms too (seemingly screwy ones). "<Profile>\Application Data" is not readable because of a peculiar "permission".

 

[Charles Dye]

Not arguing with you, Vince. I've never understood those either.

To the original suggestion: The easiest way to find out whether a directory is readable is to try reading it. The easiest way to find out whether it's writable is to try writing to it — e.g. try creating and deleting a temp file there. My first thought would be to write it as a function, which could then be used in IF, IF, etc. as desired.

 

[vefatica]

Not arguing with you, Vince. I've never understood those either.

To the original suggestion: The easiest way to find out whether a directory is readable is to try reading it. The easiest way to find out whether it's writable is to try writing to it — e.g. try creating and deleting a temp file there. My first thought would be to write it as a function, which could then be used in IF, IF, etc. as desired.

Writable is the easy one (as you said, just try it). I don't fully understand and I don't know how robust this is, but "EXIST *" seems to be able to tell the difference between an empty directory (where it's true?) and a directory that you can't read (where it's false). Note that "EXIST NUL" doesn't work.

v:\> if exist "c:\Users\vefatica\Application Data"\* echo foo

v:\> if exist v:\empty\* echo foo
foo

 

[vefatica]

Similarly @FILES[*] will be at least 2 (. and ..) in a directory which you can read, and 0 in a directory that you can't read.

Note: "EXIST ." is always true