Errors when output dir/files exist

[whophil]

Issue by petebachant
Saturday Apr 16, 2016 at 00:34 GMT
Originally opened as https://github.com/whophil/CACTUS-SNL/issues/32

---

Making a new output dir was a good idea, but it may already exist, and produce errors like

mkdir: cannot create directory ‘output’: File exists
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘output/field’: File exists
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘output/element’: File exists

[whophil]

Comment by whophil
Saturday Apr 16, 2016 at 00:45 GMT

---

The system call to mkdir does produce errors if the directory exists, but it doesn't halt the code (at least not on my system). If the code continues, I'd say this is more of a warning than an error.

Does the code halt on your system?

[whophil]

Comment by petebachant
Saturday Apr 16, 2016 at 00:47 GMT

---

Seems like it keeps running. Can we do something like mkdir -p?

[whophil]

Comment by whophil
Saturday Apr 16, 2016 at 00:51 GMT

---

Unfortunately that would kill Windows compatibility. mkdir exists on Windows but it lacks the -p option. I think I looked briefly into a compiler and platform agnostic way to create directories on Linux/Windows and this was the easiest to implement at the time. There is probably a better way, though...

[whophil]

Comment by petebachant
Saturday Apr 16, 2016 at 01:30 GMT

---

Ah! Oh well. I will just remove the directory each run.

[whophil]

Comment by whophil
Monday Apr 18, 2016 at 18:05 GMT

---

I think I see the problem now which arises when you call CACTUS via script and it raises an "Error," potentially halting your script. Of course you could just clean the output directories before you call CACTUS. A more robust solution would be to compile different code bits under different environments using IFDEF statements, and then call the appropriate mkdir commands under each environment.

[whophil]

Comment by whophil
Tuesday Apr 19, 2016 at 03:07 GMT

---

See whophil@e5cb8da

I haven't had time to test it on Windows or with Intel Fortran, but it works using GFortran on Linux, which I believe is your environment as well.

[whophil]

Comment by petebachant
Tuesday Apr 19, 2016 at 03:37 GMT

---

Can confirm it works on Linux with GFortran. I don't have an environment setup to compile Fortran on Windows to test though.