OSX: system("pwd > zzzTempFile"); does not create zzzTempFile

Just a guess, but the file is probably being created, but not where you expect.

Put a full path in front of the zzzTempFile name to make sure it is where you want it to be.  I don't know if Mavericks is the same as the older stuff (I'm running 10.5.8) but on my system I would use:

pwd > /Users/doug/Desktop/zzzTempFile

Regards,

Doug

Thanks Doug for your reply.

The reason I want to export the home directory is that I can then read it back and use it in the .ulp. Something like this:

         string tempFileName = "zzzTempFile";

    string completeCommand = "pwd  > " + tempFileName;

    system( completeCommand );

    string lines[];

    fileread( lines, tempFileName );

    string removeTempFile = "rm " + tempFileName;

    system( removeTempFile );

    string homeDirectory =  lines[0];

It always fails the 'fileread( lines, tempFileName);' So maybe the output is in an unexpected location, the fileread does not look in the same unexpected location.

On mavericks the full path—as you suggested—works, system( "pwd `/zzzTempFile") does not.

The only way round it—as far as I can see—is to call an external, for example python, program which does it all. But that means yet another snippet of code.

I presume that failing system("pwd zzzTempFile") is a bug.

The real issue is that system() cannot return anything apart from whether the operation was successful or not.

I do this kind of thing a lot actually.  Since I have different designs, I always put my engineering notes and temporary files in the same directory with the schematic and board files that I'm working on.  There is a brief discussion of this at: http://www.element14.com/community/thread/26510/l/engineering-notes-within-eagle

I use this general idea in all my scripts that write something to disk, and I think you might be able to modify it for your needs:

string ScriptName = "my-script";

string Version = "1.00";

 

string a[];

string command;

string scriptfile;

 

 

 

if (schematic) {

  schematic(SCH){

    string directory = filedir(SCH.name) + "scripts";

    int n = fileglob(a, directory);

    if (n == 0){

      sprintf(command, "mkdir %s", directory);

      system(command);

    }

    int t = time();

    string datestring = t2string(t, "yyyyMMdd-hh:mm:ss");

    sprintf(scriptfile, "%s/%s-%s.scr", directory, ScriptName, datestring);

    output(scriptfile) {

      printf("Do something here....\n");

    }

  }

  sprintf(command, "script %s", scriptfile);

  exit(command);

}

(Change as appropriate to use board instead of schematic.)  This script creates a subdirectory in your project called "scripts" and puts everything there to keep from cluttering things up.  I don't delete files, in case I want to go back and see what I really did or do some debugging, so I add a date string into the filename to keep them unique.  For your purposes, I haven't included a read statement, but you should be able to just use "scriptfile".

FWIW, I used to create command strings in memory and run them on exit, but I seem to write long scripts and I keep using up the memory buffers, so that's what inspired me to write scripts to disk and run them from there.