I need a cross-platform way to get the current working directory (yes, getcwd does what I want). I thought this might do the trick:
#ifdef _WIN32
#include <direct.h>
#define getcwd _getcwd // stupid MSFT "deprecation" warning
#elif
#include <unistd.h>
#endif
#include <string>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
string s_cwd(getcwd(NULL,0));
cout << "CWD is: " << s_cwd << endl;
}
I got this reading:
_getcwd
at MSDN
getcwd
at Kernel.org
getcwd
at Apple.com
There should be no memory leaks, and it should work on a Mac as well, correct?
UPDATE: I fear something is still wrong here (I'm trying to avoid creating a char array with a determined length, as there's no proper way to get a decent length for getcwd):
char* a_cwd = getcwd(NULL,0);
string s_cwd(a_cwd);
free(a_cwd); // or delete a_cwd?
You cannot call getcwd
with a NULL buffer. As per the Opengroup:
If buf is a null pointer, the behavior of getcwd() is unspecified.
Also, getcwd can return NULL which can break a string constructor.
You'll need to change that to something like:
char buffer[SIZE];
char *answer = getcwd(buffer, sizeof(buffer));
string s_cwd;
if (answer)
{
s_cwd = answer;
}
If it is no problem for you to include, use boost filesystem for convenient cross-platform filesystem operations.
boost::filesystem::path full_path( boost::filesystem::current_path() );
Here is an example.
EDIT: as pointed out by Roi Danton in the comments, filesystem became part of the ISO C++ in C++17, so boost is not needed anymore:
std::filesystem::current_path();
Calling getcwd with a NULL pointer is implementation defined. It often does the allocation for you with malloc (in which case your code does have a memory leak). However, it isn't guaranteed to work at all. So you should allocate your own buffer.
char *cwd_buffer = malloc(sizeof(char) * max_path_len);
char *cwd_result = getcwd(cwd_buffer, max_path_len);
The Open Group has an example showing how to get the max path length from _PC_PATH_MAX. You could consider using MAX_PATH on Windows. See this question for caveats to this number on both platforms.