Hi group,

I am playing around a bit making a program of a colleague a bit more
robust, and have a question about input/output files.

I managed to make sure the input file can be given as a relative or
absolute path now, and even without the required extension with the
following snippet:

String inFileName = args[0];
if (!inFileName.endsWith(".export")) {
   inFileName += ".export";
}
File inFile = null;
try {
   inFile = new File(inFileName);
   inFile = inFile.getCanonicalFile();
} catch (IOException e) {
   System.out.format("Error getting canonical file name:");
   e.printStackTrace();
   System.exit(1);
}

try {
   BufferedReader corpus = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(inFile));

Then, later on, I can make similarly named files as follows:

String fileDir = inFile.getParent();
String fileName = inFile.getName();
fileName = fileName.replace(".export", "");
String sigFileName = fileDir + File.separator + "td"
 + File.separator + fileName + ".sig";
final ObjectOutputStream sigfile = new ObjectOutputStream(
new FileOutputStream(sigFileName));

although I get a warning in the first line that inFile might be null.

My question is about the creation of the directory: initially, the td/
directory might not be there.  It is created automatically, and used if
it is already there.

Is this a good way to do this, or should I use File.mkdir()?

Any other remarks on how to do this more nicely?  For example, a way to
recover instead of doing System.exit.

Cheers, H.