Re: [Maxima-discuss] "Save" location

[Robert D. <rob...@gm...>]

On 2019-06-11, Stern, Michael (NIH/NIA/IRP) [E] via Maxima-discuss <max...@li...> wrote:

> How can I save values, sessions to my home directory?  When I do
> save("file",...) from wxmaxima it saves it in the wxmaxima folder on
> my C drive instead of the maxima home directory on my data drive where
> everything else maxima is located, and with no extension even though
> it is a lisp file.  In order to load it in the usual way I need to
> move it to the home directory and then add .lisp to the name to make
> it accessible.  How can I avoid this (other than by typing a full
> filepath).  When I do it from maxima.bat, it puts it in the maxima
> directory on the C drive.  For obvious reasons I don't wan to be
> writing data to my system SSD.

Well, on looking at the source code for 'save' in src/dsksetup.lisp, I
see that it opens its output file without appending a path or changing
the working directory or anything. So the output file will go whereever
the Lisp implementation thinks is the default directory.

I can see some different ways forward. One would be to append one of the
existing paths, maxima_tempdir or maxima_userdir, to the file name in
'save'. That would be straightforward to do.

Another idea is to call a "change directory" function. There are
probably multiple implementations of such a function in various Common
Lisp packages. One that I know is CHDIR in the UIOP/OS package of the
UIOP project (which provides a system-independent compability layer for
files and filesystem operations). UIOP is used by ASDF, which might be
included in the Maxima image you are using -- try :lisp (require :asdf)
and then :lisp (find-package "UIOP"). If that returns something, try
:lisp (uiop/os:chdir "something/something/something"). If that succeeds,
then maybe save("foo.lisp", ...) will put foo.lisp there -- I tried that
and it did work as expected.

If ASDF is not in your Maxima image, maybe you are willing to install
Quicklisp (http://beta.quicklisp.org) and then
:lisp (ql:quickload :uiop) after which try :lisp (uiop/os:chdir ...).

This is all certainly a clumsy mess and I'm just trying to figure out
something that could work.

If all else fails then just writing save("foo/bar/baz/quux.lisp", ...)
should work, and it's not too painful.

Hope this helps,

Robert Dodier