Replace file using std::filesystem - c++

Often there is a pattern
of writing an output to temporary file(bla.txt.tmp)
deleting the original (rm bla.txt)
renaming a new one(bla.txt.tmp -> bla.txt)
Is there any utility function in std::filesystem to do this or I need to do steps one by one using rename and remove.

No. There is no such utility function in the standard library. Each step can be done with std::filesystem though and you can write such utility function yourself.
std::filesystem::rename does perform both steps 2. and 3. in one call, but creating the new file must be done separately.

Related

Is it possible to modify the Lua script to require?

When I call require 'name' in Lua, the name can be either a preloaded module name or a file that exists in a current working directory.
I have the following two questions:
A. I would like to know if it's possible to find out whether a preloaded module or a file will be required right before it will be required.
B. And if it's a file, I want to modify the script which will be required (by prepending/appending some code on top of existing one) and then require the modified script finally.
Are A and B both possible?
P.S.: I'm using Lua with C++.
Are A and B both possible?
Yes, as you can write your own "require" function that does what you need (including everything you describe). You can also look at package.searchers, as registering your function as one of the searchers may be enough to implement what you want.

Accessing files made with mktemp for Linux through C++

I am trying to create a temporary file on a Linux system, but interfacing through C++ (so that the Linux commands are run through the C++ program).
To do so, I am using mktemp, which produces a temporary file.
I would need to later refer back to this file.
However, the filename is randomly generated and I am wondering if there is an easy way to access the filename.
The big honking comment in mktemp(3)'s manual page explicitly tells you to use mkstemp(3) instead of mktemp(3), and explains the good reason why it is so.
If you actually read the manual page for mkstemp(3) it clearly explains that the library function modifies the character buffer that's passed to it as a parameter to reflect the actual name of the created temporary file.
So to determine the name of the temporary file, simply refer to the character buffer you passed to this library function.

sed/regex - Updating source files with scope issues

I have a project originally written for Windows, and I am currently in the process of porting it over to Linux. Most of the platform specific code has been #ifdef'ed or wrapped, so it's been easy so far.
This project has about 2000 instances of gettext() scattered throughout about 200 source files (.cpp and .c compiled as C++). The intended function call is:
std::string boost::locale::gettext(const char*);
This works in Windows, but in Linux builds, it resolves to:
char * gettext (const char * msgid);
Which I assume it's resolving from <libintl.h>, which is interesting, since I'm not including it.
What I need to do is to do the following:
Find in all my source files (ignoring the .svn directories):
1.1. Lines containing gettext(.*).c_str() and modify them to become boost::locale::gettext(.*).c_str().
1.2. Lines containing gettext(.*) and modify them to become boost::locale::gettext(.*).c_str().
What's the best way to accomplish this, preferably using BASh and sed, or some command-line-fu in general? The requirements for 1.1 I could probably do easily enough, but 1.2 is a bit more complex, and I'm not sure how to have it know which right parentheses ) to append .c_str() to correctly.
Thank you.
This problem is not solvable with a regex in the general case, since you cannot find the matching closing parenthesis of the gettext()-call with it if other calls are nested in its argument list.
But if usually no nested calls are made, it might be an option to just fix these cases automatically and do the rest by hand.
This sed expression
sed -r "s/gettext\(([^()]*)\)(\.c_str\(\))?/boost::locale::gettext(\1).c_str()/g"
should leave invocations with nested calls untouched and replace the rest.

Parsing C++ to make some changes in the code

I would like to write a small tool that takes a C++ program (a single .cpp file), finds the "main" function and adds 2 function calls to it, one in the beginning and one in the end.
How can this be done? Can I use g++'s parsing mechanism (or any other parser)?
If you want to make it solid, use clang's libraries.
As suggested by some commenters, let me put forward my idea as an answer:
So basically, the idea is:
... original .cpp file ...
#include <yourHeader>
namespace {
SpecialClass specialClassInstance;
}
Where SpecialClass is something like:
class SpecialClass {
public:
SpecialClass() {
firstFunction();
}
~SpecialClass() {
secondFunction();
}
}
This way, you don't need to parse the C++ file. Since you are declaring a global, its constructor will run before main starts and its destructor will run after main returns.
The downside is that you don't get to know the relative order of when your global is constructed compared to others. So if you need to guarantee that firstFunction is called
before any other constructor elsewhere in the entire program, you're out of luck.
I've heard the GCC parser is both hard to use and even harder to get at without invoking the whole toolchain. I would try the clang C/C++ parser (libparse), and the tutorials linked in this question.
Adding a function at the beginning of main() and at the end of main() is a bad idea. What if someone calls return in the middle?.
A better idea is to instantiate a class at the beginning of main() and let that class destructor do the call function you want called at the end. This would ensure that that function always get called.
If you have control of your main program, you can hack a script to do this, and that's by far the easiet way. Simply make sure the insertion points are obvious (odd comments, required placement of tokens, you choose) and unique (including outlawing general coding practices if you have to, to ensure the uniqueness you need is real). Then a dumb string hacking tool to read the source, find the unique markers, and insert your desired calls will work fine.
If the souce of the main program comes from others sources, and you don't have control, then to do this well you need a full C++ program transformation engine. You don't want to build this yourself, as just the C++ parser is an enormous effort to get right. Others here have mentioned Clang and GCC as answers.
An alternative is our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit with its C++ front end. DMS, using its C++ front end, can parse code (for a variety of C++ dialects), builds ASTs, carry out full name/type resolution to determine the meaning/definition/use of all symbols. It provides procedural and source-to-source transformations to enable changes to the AST, and can regenerate compilable source code complete with original comments.

Registering each C/C++ source file to create a runtime list of used sources

For a debugging and logging library, I want to be able to find, at runtime, a list of all of the source files that the project has compiled and linked. I assume I'll be including some kind of header in each source file, and the preprocessor __FILE__ macro can give me a character constant for that file, so I just need to somehow "broadcast" that information from each file to be gathered by a runtime function.
The question is how to elegantly do this, and especially if it can be done from C as opposed to C++. In C++ I'd probably try to make a class with a static storage to hold the list of filenames. Each header file would create a file-local static instance of that class, which on creation would append the FILE pointer or whatever into the class's static data members, perhaps as a linked list.
But I don't think this will work in C, and even in C++ I'm not sure it's guaranteed that each element will be created.
I wouldn't do that sort of thing right in the code. I would write a tool which parsed the project file (vcproj, makefile or even just scan the project directory for *.c* files) and generated an additional C source file which contained the names of all the source files in some kind of pre-initialized data structure.
I would then make that tool part of the build process so that every time you do a build this would all happen automatically. At run time, all you would have to do is read that data structure that was built.
I agree with Ferruccio, the best way to do this is in the build system, not the code itself. As an expansion of his idea, add a target to your build system which dumps a list of the files (which it has to know anyway) to a C file as a string, or array of strings, and compile this file into your source. This avoids a lot of complication in the source, and is expandable, if you want to add additional information, like the version number from your source code control system, who built the executable, etc.
There is a standard way on UNIX and Linux - ident. For every source file you create ID tag - usually it is assigned by you version control system, e.g. SVN keywords.
Then to find out the name and revision of each source file you just use ident command. If you need to do it at runtime check out how ident does it - source for it should be freely available.
Theres no way to do it in C. In C++ you can create a class like this:
struct Reg {
Reg( const char * file ) {
StaticDictionary::Register( file );
};
where StaticDictionary is a singleton container for all your file names. Then in each source file:
static Reg regthisfile( __FILE__ );
You would want to make the dictionary a Meyers singleton to avoid order of creation problems.
I don't think you can do this in the way you outline in a "passive" mode. That is, you are going to somehow run code for each source file to be added to the registry, it's hard to get it to happen automatically.
Of course, it's possible that you can make that code very unobtrusive using macros. It might be problematic for C source files that don't have an "entrypoint", so if your code isn't already organised as "modules", with e.g. an init() function for each module, it might be hard. Static initializing code might be possible, I'm not 100% sure if the order in which things are initialized creates problems here.
Using static storage in the registry module sounds like an excellent idea, a plain linked list or simple hash table should be easy enough to implement, if your project doesn't already include any general-purpose utility library.
In C++ your solution will work. It's guaranteed.
Edit: Just found out a solution in my head: Change a rule in your makefile to add
'-include "cfiles_register.h"' to each 'g++ file.cpp'.
%.o : %.cpp
$(CC) -include 'cfiles_register.h' -o $# $<
put your proposed in the question implemnatation to that 'cfiles_register.h'.
Using static instances in C++ would work fine.
You could do this also in C, but you need to use runtime specific features - for MSVC CRT take a look at http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/misc/misc/threadsprocesses/article.php/c6945/
For C - you could do it with a macro - define a variable named corresponding to your file, and then you could scan the symbols of your executable, just as an idea:
#define TRACK_FILE(name) char _file_tracker_##name;
use it in your my_c_file.c like this:
TRACK_FILE(my_c_file_c)
and than grep all file/variable names from the binary like this
nm my-binary | grep _file_tracker
Not really nice, but...
Horrible idea, I'm sure, but use a singleton. And on each file do something like
Singleton.register(__FILE__);
at global scope. It'll only work on cpp files though.
I did something like this years ago as a novice, and it worked. But I'd cringe to do it now. I'd add a build step now.
I agree with those who say that it is better to avoid doing this at run time, but in C, you can initialize a static variable with a function call, that is, in every file:
static int doesntmatter = register( __FILE__);