Delivery-Date: Sat Oct 25 14:55:49 2008
Message-Id: <200810252206.m9PM6Hc9004303@bourbon.usc.edu>
To: cs551@merlot.usc.edu
Subject: Re: cs551- final1
Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2008 15:06:17 -0700
From: Bill Cheng <william@bourbon.usc.edu>

SOmeone wrote:

  > The init_neighbor_list file for each node needs to be created inside its
  > home directory. So we will actually have to create all the directories on
  > the fly in our code so that the node searches for the file at the right
  > place (inside the right directory), right ?

No.  The spec for HomeDir says:

    If this directory does not exist, your program should exit.

  > Also for the status request, the 3rd argument which is the external file
  > readable by NAM (relative to the current working directory if it does not
  > begin with a / character). Does it mean that if we give the file as
  > /a/b/c/status.out , we will have to create directories a,b,c first and if
  > only status.out is given, it will create a status.out inside the directory
  > where all our code files are (not inside the home directory of each node)

If the user specifies /a/b/c/status.out and /a/b/c does not
exist, you can either create the directory or report an error
and ask the user to specify the command again.

If the user specifies just status.out, you will need to create
status.out in the "current working directory" and *not* where
the code is.  The "current working directory" is the current
directory before you start running the sv_node command.  If I
do:

    mkdir /tmp/mydir
    cd /tmp/mydir
    /pathtoyourcode/sv_node

then the current working directory is /tmp/mydir.  If you 
really need to know what the current working directory is,
you can call getcwd().
--
Bill Cheng // bill.cheng@usc.edu <URL:http://merlot.usc.edu/william/usc/>