NAME¶
::vfs - Commands and Procedures to create virtual filesystems
SYNOPSIS¶
package require Tcl 8.4
package require vfs ?1.2.1?
vfs::filesystem info
vfs::filesystem mount
vfs::filesystem unmount
vfs::accessMode mode
vfs::matchDirectories types
vfs::matchFiles types
vfs::matchCorrectTypes types filelist ?inDir?
DESCRIPTION¶
The
::vfs package provides commands to query, mount and unmount virtual
filesystems, and provides as Tcl libraries some facilities for helping the
writing of new virtual filesystems in Tcl. Once a virtual filesystem is in
place, the standard Tcl
file,
glob,
cd,
pwd,
open commands, including all their C APIs in the Tcl library (e.g.
Tcl_FSOpenFileChannel,
Tcl_FSMatchInDirectory,...), can be used
within the filesystem (and indeed, properly written extensions such as Tk
which may open or read files will also transparently access the virtual
filesystem). Because all of Tcl's FS activity passes through a single layer,
it can all be intercepted. This package does just that. Notice that this is
quite different to overloading the
file command in Tcl. We are actually
providing vfs replacements for C commands like
access,
stat. By
implementing just a handful of commands at this low level, we ensure that all
commands at higher levels function irrespective of what is going on inside the
FS layer.
Tcl's filesystem hooks operate on a per-process basis. This means every Tcl
interpreter in the same process/application sees the same filesystem,
including any virtual filesystems.
The
package require vfs command should be used to access this library. It
automatically registers the vfs hooks into Tcl's filesystem, and these will
not be removed until Tcl exits (if desired, control over this could be exposed
to Tcl in the future). However, the vfs package will at that stage not have
any new filesystems mounted, so it will have little effect. Note that
package require vfs has two effects. First of all, when it is issued in
any Tcl interpreter it will ensure the vfs hooks have been registered
with Tcl's core just once (and if any of those interpreters are later deleted,
the vfs hooks will still remain registered - they remain until Tcl exits). The
second effect is to provide the command
vfs::filesystem which allows
the interpreter to intercept filesystem commands and handle them with Tcl code
in that interpreter.
There are three somewhat unsupported subcommands of
vfs::filesystem,
fullynormalize path,
posixerror int,
internalerror
?script?, which are used to normalize a path (including any final
symlink), to register a posix error code with a Tcl error, and to trap/report
internal errors in tclvfs implementations respectively.
- vfs::filesystem mount ?-volume? path
command
- To use a virtual filesystem, it must be 'mounted'. Mounting involves
declaring to the vfs package that any subdirectories of a given
path in the filesystem should be handled by the given
command which should be a Tcl command or procedure in the
interpreter in which the vfs::filesystem is executed. If the
?-volume? flag is given, the given mount point is also registered
with Tcl as a new volume (like a new drive which will appear in file
volumes). This is useful (and required for reasonable operation) for
mounts like ftp://. For paths mounted inside the native filesystem,
it should of course not be given. The new filesystem mounts will be
observed immediately in all interpreters in the current process. If the
interpreter is later deleted, all mounts which are intercepted by it will
be automatically removed (and will therefore affect the view of the
filesystem seen by all interpreters).
- vfs::filesystem unmount path
- This unmounts the virtual filesystem which was mounted at path
(hence removing it from Tcl's filesystem), or throws an error if no
filesystem was mounted there.
- vfs::filesystem info ?path?
- If no arguments are given, this returns a list of all filesystems mounted
(in all interpreters). If a path argument is given, then the
command to be used for that path is returned, or an error is thrown
if no vfs is mounted for that path. There is currently no facility for
examining in which interpreter each command will be evaluated.
- vfs::filesystem fullynormalize path
- Performs a full expansion of path, (as per 'file normalize'), but
including following any links in the last element of path.
IMPLEMENTING A TCL ONLY VFS¶
The vfs package will intercept every filesystem operation which falls within a
given mount point, and pass the operation on to the mount point's
command in the interpreter which registered it. In general this occurs
by the C equivalent of an evaluation like this:
eval $command [list $subcmd
$root $relative $actualpath] $args.
Here
subcmd may be any of the following:
access,
createdirectory,
deletefile,
fileattributes,
matchindirectory,
open,
removedirectory,
stat,
utime. If
command takes appropriate action for each of these
cases, a complete, perfect virtual filesystem will be achieved,
indistinguishable to Tcl from the native filesystem. (CAVEATS: right now I
don't expose to Tcl all the permission-related flags of 'glob').
The remaining arguments specify a file path on which to operate (all commands
operate on one of these), and any additional arguments which may be required
to carry out the action. The file path is specified by three arguments:
root is the part of the path which lies outside this filesystem's mount
point,
relative is the part of the path which lies inside this
filesytem, and
actualpath is the original (unnormalized) name of the
path which was used in the current command wherever it originated (in Tcl or
C). For example, if
C:/foo/bar/mount.zip/xxx/yyy is a path in your
filesystem, where
mount.zip is a zip archive which has been mounted (on
top of itself) and contains
xxx/yyy, and the current working directory
is inside
xxx, and we evaluate a command like
file exists
yyy, then
root will be
C:/foo/bar/mount.zip,
relative will be
xxx/yyy, and
actualpath will be
yyy. The file separator between the
root and
relative is
omitted.
Note that most filesystem operations will only require the
relative
argument to work correctly, but the other arguments are actually required for
correct operation of some subcommands.
Almost all of these commands should either return correctly (i.e. with a TCL_OK
result at the C level) or they should use vfs::filesystem posixerror to signal
the appropriate posix error code. If a Tcl error is thrown, that should be
considered a bug, but it will be interpreted as an unknown posix error in the
filesystem call. The exceptions to these rules are those filesystem commands
which are able to specify a Tcl error message directly: open (when an
interpreter is given), matchindirectory and fileattributes (for a set or get
operation only). These three commands are allowed to throw any Tcl error
message which will be passed along to the caller, or they may throw a posix
error which will be handled appropriately.
The actual commands are as follows (where
r-r-a represents the standard
argument triplet of
root,
relative and
actualpath):
- command access r-r-a mode
- Return TCL_OK or throw a posix error depending on whether the given access
mode (which is an integer) is compatible with the file.
- command createdirectory r-r-a
- Create a directory with the given name. The command can assume that all
sub-directories in the path exist and are valid, and that the actual
desired path does not yet exist (Tcl takes care of all of that for
us).
- command deletefile r-r-a
- Delete the given file.
- command fileattributes r-r-a ?index?
?value?
- If neither index nor value is given, then return a list of all acceptable
attribute names. If index is given, but no value, then retrieve the
value of the index'th attribute (counting in order over the list
returned when no argument is given) for the given file. If a value is also
given then set the index'th attribute of the given file to that
value.
- command matchindirectory r-r-a pattern
types
- Return the list of files or directories in the given path (which is always
the name of an existing directory), which match the pattern and are
compatible with the types given. It is very important that the
command correctly handle types requests for directories only (and
files only), because to handle any kind of recursive globbing, Tcl will
actually generate requests for directory-only matches from the filesystem.
See vfs::matchDirectories below for help.
- command open r-r-a mode
permissions
- For this command, mode is any of "r", "w",
"a", "w+", "a+". If the open involves
creating a file, then permissions dictates what modes to create it
with. If the open operation was not successful, an error should be thrown.
If the open operation is successful, the command should return a list of
either one or two items. The first item (which is obligatory) is the name
of the channel which has been created. The second item, if given, is a
Tcl-callback to be used when the channel is closed, so that the vfs can
clean up as appropriate. This callback will be evaluated by Tcl just
before the channel is closed. The channel will still exist, and all
available data will have been flushed into it. The callback can, for
example, seek to the beginning of the channel, read its contents and store
that contents elsewhere (e.g. compressed or on a remote ftp site, etc).
The return code or any errors returned by the callback are ignored (if the
callback wishes to signal an error, it must do so asycnhronously, with
bgerror, for example), unless the 'internalerror' script has been
specified, when they are passed to that script for further action.
- command removedirectory r-r-a recursive
- Delete the given directory. recursive is either 0 or 1. If it is 1
then even if the directory is non-empty, an attempt should be made to
recursively delete it and its contents. If it is 0 and the directory is
non-empty, a posix error (ENOTEMPTY) should be thrown.
- command stat r-r-a
- Return a list of even length containing field-name and value pairs for the
contents of a stat structure. The order is not important. The option names
are dev (long), ino (long), mode (int), nlink (long), uid (long), gid
(long), size (long), atime (long), mtime (long), ctime (long), type
(string which is either "directory" or "file"), where
the type of each argument is given in brackets. The procedure should
therefore return with something like return [list dev 0 type file
mtime 1234 ...].
- command utime r-r-a actime mtime
- Set the access and modification times of the given file (these are read
with 'stat').
VFS HELPERS¶
The vfslib provides a number of Tcl procedures which can help with writing
command procedures to handle the above possibilities. These are:
- vfs::accessMode mode
- converts an integer access mode to a somewhat more preferable
string, any of F X W XW R RX RW.
- vfs::matchDirectories types
- Does types want directories included?
- vfs::matchFiles types
- Does types want files included?
- vfs::matchCorrectTypes types filelist
?inDir?
- Returns that subset of the filelist (which are either absolute
paths or names of files in inDir) which are compatible with the
types given.
VFS DEBUGGING¶
Use something like this to debug problems in your implementation:
vfs::filesystem internalerror report ; proc report {} { puts stderr
$::errorInfo }
LIMITATIONS¶
There are very few limitations to the vfs code. One subtlety that you may
encounter is if you mount a case-sensitive virtual filesystem into a
case-insensitive system (e.g. the standard Windows or MacOS fs) and your code
relies on case-insensitivity, then it will not run properly in the virtual
filesystem. Of course if your code relies on case-insensitivity, it wouldn't
run under Tcl on Unix either, so the best solution is to fix your code!
We may add
link and
lstat commands in the future to allow virtual
filesystems to support reading and writing links - this is supported by the C
API, but has simply not been exposed to Tcl in this extension, yet.
The Tcl 'Tcl_FSMatchInDirectory' function takes a variety of type information in
a Tcl_GlobTypeData structure. We currently only expose the 'type' field from
that structure (so the 'permissions' and MacOS type/creator fields are
ignored).
KEYWORDS¶
vfs, filesystem, file