Question

I have a C++ file in my C++ project in Visual Studio.
The C++ file has a snippet wherein some applications are run using system

system("Files\\tx1");
system("Files\\tx2");
system("Files\\tx3");
system("Files\\tx4");

I want to replace the “Files” constant with some constant variable which can be changed at a single place. Something like what we wuld do in C# with app.config files etc.
Directly hardcoding a constant is not a good practice. C++ project doesn’t have settings file unlike C# projects. So, any suggestions what I should do in this case?

Answer 1

If you want to use a compile time approach (as with the app.config in C#) you can use defines.

conf.h

#define FILES "mypath"

impl.c

#include "conf.h"
...

system(FILES "tx1");

When you prefer a runtime approach, there are numerous formats/libraries for configuration files.