M3PathElemOS is an operating system independent interface to basic operations on search paths and search path elements.

INTERFACE M3PathElemOS;

IMPORT M3PathElemList;

TYPE T <: REFANY;

PROCEDURE Uid(dir: TEXT): T;

Return a handle to denote directory dir. Two handles that denote the same directory will return TRUE wwhen passed to Equal.

PROCEDURE Equal(t1, t2: T): BOOLEAN;

Return TRUE iff t1 and t2 denote the same directory.

PROCEDURE EnvExpand(dir: TEXT): TEXT;

Expand any environment variables in dir, according to the conventions of the operating system.

PROCEDURE RemoveParentDenotations(dir: TEXT): TEXT;

Return a pathname with as many parent directory denotations removed as possible.

PROCEDURE DecomposePath(path: TEXT; readOnly := FALSE): M3PathElemList.T;

path is a list of directories separated by an OS-specific character, e.g. :. The path is decomposed into its components and an M3PathElemList.T is generated. Each member of the result is created by a call of M3PathElem.FromText(EnvExpand(c), c, readOnly), where c is the component pathname.

END M3PathElemOS.