Command line args available in scope (in particular temporary-directory)

[ngless-toolkit]

Command line args available in scope (in particular temporary-directory)

[luispedro]

What is the use case of exporting TMPDIR to the environment? If you want to write some output there, then using ARGV feels very logical to me, actually.

I agree on the documentation issue. Off the top of my head, I don't think there are other builtins, although the "batch" module defines some additional ones.

[luispedro]

I mistakenly deleted a comment (Sorry). Here is the original content:

I rely more on $TMPDIR these days which is only known at runtime.
Recently I've also tried the sbcast feature on SLURM nodes to compartmentalize IO.

sbcast recommends using $TMPDIR for databases and such so I was going for:

DB = TMPDIR + "/database.fna"
at the moment I do:

TMPDIR = ARGV[1]
DB = TMPDIR + "/database.fna"

[luispedro]

sbcast is indeed a valid use case.

I have considered introducing a database search path feature. I'm afraid of making it "too magical", but this might be a more general solution.

[luispedro]

I am going to fix the documentation on constants.

I also think that a database search path is a good feature, which will address this and other cases in a generic way.