SpecialFolder

Archives Forums/MacOS X Discussion/SpecialFolder

Tricky(Posted 2007) [#1]
For Windows somebody wrote me a routine in which I could read special folders.

Like

SpecialFolder($0001) = "C:\Documents and Settings\Tricky\My Documents"

Very handy, especially since the names of such folders could differ when somebody uses Windows in a foreign Language.


Now my question is, is there a possibility to do the same with the special folders of MacOS, since in MacOS too the names of folders do differ on MacOS when you have a foreign language. For example I know that the "/Applications" folder is called "/Programma's" in the Dutch version of MacOS.

So if somebody knows a BMax routine in which I can check all special Folders MacOS uses, I would be really grateful if you want to share its code with me.

Thanks a lot.


Winni(Posted 2007) [#2]
In Mac OS X, the folders actually do --not-- differ in different language versions. It's just Finder that displays the "special" folders in localized language. When you open Terminal, you will find that there are many more directories under "/" than Finder shows and that /Applications always is /Applications, no matter what GUI language you have selected. By the way, Windows Vista is now doing something similar - the real folder names are always in English, but Windows Explorer displays them in localized language.

OS X is multilingual to the core and you can safely always use /Users/.... or /Applications/... in your OS X application and disregard the language section.


LarsG(Posted 2007) [#3]
I'm not 100% sure on this, but I believe that the folders actually have english names "under the hood".. I think OSX just translates the "names" into what your current locale is.. if you open a terminal, you'll see the folders are named "Applications" and "Users" etc...


Tricky(Posted 2007) [#4]
I see.... Since I use the English version of MacOS (even though I'm Dutch) I've never sorted this out.

Thanks a lot