Re: fileexist(f)

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Thursday 09 March 2006 09:03 am, Hans-Bernhard Br=C3=B6ker wrote:
> What's the point of asking a question like "if fileexists", when
> there's nothing useful that could be done with the answer, that we
> can't already do later on, when a command actually tries to read it?=20

I am in 100% agreement with you.
The discussion of Petr's xxx_exist() functions was a spin-off
that was probably a total waste of time.

My preferred method of dealing with this issue is to handle
missing/empty files cleanly during the plotting process.
That is relatively straightforward for 2D plotting from ascii
files, and I have already posted a patch that does so.

The code for binary files is a mess, and the 3D code
is very different from the 2D code.  So far I do not see an
easy way to modify these code paths to handle missing files.

Should I go ahead and apply the patch for 2D code,
which is after all a major category of use?

If inspiration (or code clean-up) strikes for the 3D/binary
case we can deal with that later.  For the present it would
remain a known limitation that 2D plots can handle missing
files cleanly, but 3D plots cannot.

=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA