Re: [h-e-w] Re: Dired on windows

[Dr Francis J. Wright]

From: "Benjamin Riefenstahl" <address@hidden>
To: <address@hidden>
Sent: Sunday, February 09, 2003 2:28 PM
Subject: [h-e-w] Re: Dired on windows


> "Dr Francis J. Wright" <address@hidden> writes:
> > Windows Script Host provides access to the FileSystem object and the
> > Network object, which should provide the information required about
> > local and network drives.
>
> No need to go that far, the basic API GetLogicalDrives() reports the
> information and is most likely just used by these high-level services.

But how do you expose that API to ELisp?  You could either add code to the C
kernel of Emacs or write a free-standing C program and call that from ELisp.
I think the latter is better for prototyping and is essentially what WSH
does, which is why I propose to use it.

> Anyway, GetLogicalDrives() does not access all the drives (at least
> not on NT).  It just reports all drives that are currently managed by
> some driver.
>
> It doesn't determine if there is actually a floppy or cd loaded and it
> doesn't check the actual validity of network connections.  If you
> really want those kind of checks, than you'd have to check all drives
> individually.

Experiments on my Win XP box suggest that the FileSystem object accessible
using WSH provides a list of local drives that exist and a way to determine
whether they are accessible, i.e. it seems to provide what is required.

Francis