Hi. I'm working on a script in which I would like to insert a sequence of commands aimed to save a drawable as PAT file and eventually, when no longer needed, eliminate the file in question. This trick allows to create a temporary pattern existing only during the script execution, so as to fill a layer or a channel with the content of the drawable this pattern derives from. The problem is that I can’t choose whatever arbitrary name for the PAT file, because the destination folder might contain a file with the same name, which would therefore run the risk of being overwritten and lastly removed by the script. So, this observation points out the necessity of implementing a method for creating unique file names by means of the Scipt-Fu language. Personally, instead of writing conditional statements which cyclically verify the existence of a certain file name (with the “file-exists?” procedure), I have thought about the possibility of using the “dir-read-entry” procedure. Supposing to store the result of this command into a variable named F1, if F1 equals <#EOF>, the target directory is empty, thus any name can be chosen (for instance, “0.pat”). If the folder is not empty instead, F1 will return the name of the alphabetically first element (file or folder) inside such directory. In this case, a solution may be to create a new string called F2 by connecting the character “!”, the string F1 and, finally, the string “.pat”. Having noticed that the exclamation point is the first available symbol for naming files/folders (at least, on Windows platform), well the string F2 shall precede the string F1 in alphabetical order, so as to furnish, this way, a valid and unique file name which doesn't already exist within the folder, as confirmed by the fact that further invocations of “dir-read-entry” will return strings of higher order. In short, here is the set of procedures I imagine: (define PD (string-append gimp-data-directory "\\patterns\\")) (define STM (dir-open-stream PD)) (define F1 (dir-read-entry STM)) (if (eof-object? F1) (define F2 (string-append PD "0.pat")) (define F2 (string-append PD "!" F1 ".pat")) ) (file-pat-save 1 IMG DRW1 F2 “” “My Pattern”) (dir-close-stream STM) (gimp-patterns-refresh) (gimp-context-set-pattern “My Pattern”) (gimp-edit-bucket-fill DRW2 2 0 100 255 1 0 0) (file-delete F2) (gimp-patterns-refresh) After doing several tests, my impression is that such a stratagem should work well. Nevertheless, I'm not totally sure of its infallibility, because, among other things, I don't know if the character “!” is really the first valid symbol on all operating systems supported by GIMP, as well as I can't figure out if there are any character combinations that invalidate my remarks on the alphabetical priority performed by appending the exclamation point before whatever string. Can anyone clarify my doubts and definitely confirm or deny the effectiveness of the method I have just stated? Moreover, any suggestions on how to generate unique file names in a different and simpler way? Thanks in advance. _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
