Re: require() relative to calling file

[Scott Morgan <blumf@...>]

On 02/03/2017 07:34 AM, Russell Haley wrote:
> But the question was what is the argument against the approach
> described. ‎ It always has seemed to me that Lua goes to great length
> to search relative paths and entirely negates to look in the
> application path for no reason whatsoever. It was one of the most
> confusing things when I first started looking at Lua.


Lua does use the EXE path in Windows, but under *nix systems things
aren't so simple. There's no guarantee that the path to the executable
exists and no clear way to determine it even if it does[0] (some hacky,
platform dependant ways, but nothing clean).

See luaconf.h (search WIN32) and loadlib.c (search for windows.h)

Personally, I go with a shell script wrapper that sets the LUA_PATH etc.
environment vars before launching the app/Lua interpreter

Scott

[0] On the plus side, this is partly why you can apply updates on *nix
systems without having to reboot all the time. Windows locks it's
EXE/DLL files when used, so you can't overwrite them unless the app
stops, *nix systems don't.