Question

I am fairly new to java and I am trying to find if the file specified in the LINUX path exists.

private void validateFilePath(String filePath) {

        File dir = new File(filePath);

        if(dir.exists()){
                System.out.println("File exists in the path " + dir);
                setTARGET_IMG_DIR("filePath");
                return; 
        }else{
            System.out.println("File does not exists in the path: " + dir);
            return;
        }

    }

The dir.exists works fine if I give a absolute path from my root like this

/Users/yv/Documents/Eclipse-workspace/InputParser/bin/test.txt

but if I give a relative path like
test.txt or /InputParser/bin/test.txt it says files does not exists.

I am planing on creating a jar of this projects and hence this should work with both relative path(files in the same directory) and absolute path from the root. How can I handle this ?

Is it possible to search for the absolute path of that file from the root and append it to the file name ?

Answer 1

Eclipse typically runs with the project directory set as the user.dir, that is the base directory for execution. So if the absolute path is:

/Users/yv/Documents/Eclipse-workspace/InputParser/bin/test.txt

Then the relative path will be:

bin/test.txt

You can double check the working directory by getting the user.dir property from Java’s system properties. For more information on Java’s system properties check the documentation.