Question

I have a C++ program not reading an absolute path in Visual Studio.

The following code works on my desktop environment (Windows 7, Visual Studio 2010, 64 bit).
However, on my macbook, I am running bootcamp and/or VMware for a Windows 7 64 bit virtual machine that has the exact same Visual Studio 2010.

My attempts at fixing this problem:

1. I made sure that the absolute path is the same on my macbook as it is on the desktop. I further made double sure that I installed the third party library to read my wave file in
   the same fashion as I did for the desktop twice.

2. I rewrote the program that run on the desktop, reinstalled the library on my macbook. Simpler program works on desktop, but alas, still failed to read absolute path on macbook.

3. I moved the wav file so not to be a path, but in the actual project solution itself. No change.

4. Google.

I include the code at the bottom, for your benefit. I used libsndfile library to read a wav file. I may just try to use my very old crappy Windows laptop, but would can’t understand what could be going wrong on my macbook VM machine.

// WaveReader.cpp : main project file.

#include "stdafx.h"
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sndfile.h>

using namespace System;

int main(array<System::String ^> ^args)
{
    Console::WriteLine(L"Hello World");
    SNDFILE *sf; 
    SF_INFO info; 

    /*Open the wav file. */
    info.format = 0;
    sf = sf_open("C:\\Users\\geekyomega\\gameover.wav",SFM_READ,&info);
    if (sf == NULL)
    {
        printf("Failed to open the file.\n");
        getchar();
        exit(-1);
    }

}

My output, when I run this program is

Failed to open the file

As always, thank you for reading through this question. I deeply would appreciate any help, assistance, or wisdom any of you would have. Especially if you encountered a similar problem.

Warm Regards,
GeekyOmega

Answer 1

It turned out to be related to permissions. Also, Hans Passant is right in that absolute paths are not good coding practice. This was meant as a proof of concept, so please let me off on that technicality.

Regards,
GeekyOmega