On Sun, 17 Oct 2010, luigi scarso wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 11:09 PM, Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> In MkII, I can say
>>
>>    \ReadFile{/tmp/filename}
>>
>> to read a file in /tmp directory. However, in MkIV, that fails because
>> ReadFile is defined as
>>
>> \unexpanded\def\ReadFile     #1{\doreadfile{any}
>> {.}{#1}\donothing\donothing}
>>
>> so it explicitly searches in the . (current) directory.
>>
>> Bug or feature?
> What happen if you put a path like
> ./../../../../../tmp/filename

It works, but does not fit my need. I wanted to add an option to the 
filter module to allow the user to say:

\setupexternalfilters[directory=$TEMP]

and have all the tmp files created in $TEMP. Having to set this as a 
relative path will be really ugly.

I am just looking for macro that takes the filename as a (brace 
delimited) parameter and typesets it. I can define one on my own; but I 
thought that \ReadFile is already supposed to do that.

It is straight forward to "fix" \ReadFile so that absolute paths work:

\unexpanded\def\readfile     #1{\doreadfile{any} \empty{#1}}
\unexpanded\def\ReadFile     #1{\doreadfile{any} \empty{#1}\donothing\donothing}

I just wondering if the current behavior is a design decision or an 
oversight.

Aditya