Question

When using Boost Filesystem’s createdirectory (and createdirectories) function in the following example, “/” is being replaced with “\”.

boost::filesystem::path path ("/data/configSet");
boost::filesystem::create_directory(path);

This code snipped produces a directory called “data\configSet”, instead of creating a subdirectory of “configSet” inside “data”. The same problem occurs using createdirectories();

This issue does not occur when the code is executed on a Windows system. I am currently testing on Linux using Ubuntu 9.10

Answer 1

It looks like for some reason boost::filesystem thinks that you are on Windows, not Linux, and thus is using Windows style pathnames (separated by \). Can you post a bit more information about how you are building Boost and how you’re including the headers? Are you perhaps building a Windows version of Boost on Linux?

edit: I have tried setting myself up in a configuration as close to yours as possible. Ubuntu 9.10, libboost1.40-all-dev installed. When I compile and run the following program, it works as expected, creating a directory named configSet in /data.

#include <boost/filesystem.hpp>

int main() {
  boost::filesystem::path p("/data/configSet");
  boost::filesystem::create_directory(p);

  return 0;
}

Can you try compiling and running that program, with the following commands, and see if it gives you different results?

$ g++ -o boost-filesystem -lboost_filesystem boost-filesystem.cpp
$ ./boost-filesystem