Question

I’m writing a program that needs to access a file inside of c:\program files\program_name\.

My target file will always be inside of \program_name\program_name\bin\something.exe

However, because the program is extracted from an archive, if the user unpacks it improperly, it’ll be simply \program_name\bin\something.exe, skipping a whole level.

Currently I’m basically getting the contents of c:\program files\, collecting the names of all folders that contain program_name, then adding them to the list and then using the list to loop through each one of those seeing if there’s a program_name inside of it, etc, which should eventually lead me to the result.

Basically I’m creating large chunks of code for each individual possibility. Is there a smarter way to go about this?

Answer 1

Sounds like you could benefit from having an installer that writes to the registry. Then you’ll know where all the files and folders are, even if the user installs to a weird location.