Index to a Few Java Items

GetEnvironment

This fills a strange gap that was introduced in version 1.0.x: no access to environment variables. Apparently these things are considered impossible to handle in a machine-independent fashion. Of course, Larry Wall has been doing it for years in Perl, with lots of happy customers, but no doubt the people who understand these things better have their reasons.

Anyway, if you have Perl on your system (and on your customers' systems!) it's trivial to get the environment variables for Java's use. If you don't feel like doing the hack yourself (a good exercise for a beginner, maybe) here's mine.

The Evanescence of Memory

Here I document in some detail the really strange lack of any general ability to convert a simple user-given file name to something that you can store and use reliably later.

 
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