AS3 - NativeProcess that uses additional file - actionscript-3

So I have an AIR app that runs an simple command-line program. The program basically takes in a file, decompresses it, and outputs the results. The only arguments I can give it are the input file, and it automatically outputs the results in the folder it's in. Naturally, I'm running the program using the NativeProcess class, which in turn needs a NativeProcessStartupInfo object to start.
Anyway, the NativeProcessStartupInfo's workingDirectory property is set to the folder of the file I'm going to put into the program, so that the decompressed results are put into that folder. However, the thing is that the program requires an additional file (a .dat) in the same directory as it to run. Which means that wherever workingDirectory is, that .dat needs to be there as well.
For the time being, I'm copying over the .dat and deleting it after the decompression is done. I was wondering though if there's a better way to do this? Is there a value in NativeProcess or NativeProcessStartupInfo that can help that I don't know about?

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Fortran90 - compiled program creates a blank csv file instead of reading the existing one

In short: I am trying to load a csv file but the program always overwrites the existing file as an empty new file.
Longer: I am pretty new to Fortran, so bear with me. I am trying to read data from a csv file into a fortran program. Now I didn't write the program and it is pretty big, so I can't post the whole thing here. The program consists of a whole bunch of .f90 files and everything is compiled using a makefile. Now since I am loading the gcc module before compiling, I am assuming that it is compiled using GNU Fortran, because it is part of gcc. (idk how to find out if that is correct)
The compiler returns an executable in a different directory. When I execute the program in that directory it apparently overwrites the existing .csv file with a new blank one, so the program only reads "End of File". I don't know why it always creates a new file, how do I stop it from doing so?
As a side note, the csv file I am trying to read simply consists of a single column of floats, e.g.
"0.01, 0.13, 0.041,..." etc.
The code that I inserted into a subroutine of one of the .f90 files is the following:
real*8, dimension(nz) :: Nsq
integer :: i
open(10, file='Nsq.csv')
do i=1,20
read(10, *) Nsq(i)
enddo
close(10)
I have also tried to write a small test program, essentially running the same code as above. That one works just fine and outputs the contents of the csv file without any issues. For that one I use gfortran to compile it.
I have no experience in Fortran at all, so I am completely stumped, why this happens. I know the chances are slim that you guys can help me with this, since I can't provide the whole source code. But maybe someone has an idea why this occurs. Maybe you know an alternate way of reading csv files?
Thanks for your time.
The open-statement in Fortran OPEN(connect-spec-list), has a lot of connection specifications which define how an external file should be managed (see. Fortran 2018 Standard sec 12.5.6).
When you open a file using the simplest form of the open-statement:
OPEN(unit=unitid,file="filename")
A lot of default assumptions are made such as: ACCESS="SEQUENTIAL", ASYNCHRONOUS="NO", BLANK="NULL", .... The most important ones, however, are ACTION and STATUS which define the purpose of the file. The action specification states if you want to use the file for reading, writing or both, while the status essentially defines if we work on an existing file or not, and what we should do with it (replace it, keep it, ...)
Both these specifications have a default compiler dependent state.
In the Intel compiler suit, the default is action="readwrite", status="unknown" (see here and here)
Intel defines the status="unknown" as :Indicates the file may or may not exist. If the file does not exist, a new file is created and its status changes to 'OLD'.
The Gnu compiler suit has a different take on this. The default action is defined by a set of rules which depend on its accessibility if the file exists (+rw,+r-w,-r+w) (see here). The behaviour for the default action="unknown" is not documented but seems to be REWRITE (see Default Status of "Unknown" in Open)
It is advised to use a proper method if you know what you want to do with the file:
OPEN(newunit=unitid, file="filename", action="read", status="old")

How to make an Octave path root folder for all subfolders

I have a folder for Octave M-files in C:\\Users\Dropbox\Octave, under which are various subfolders by function categories (normal distribution, chisq...). I just started making those subfolders and they will keep changing (adding, removing, reshuffling) as time goes on.
I would just like to set that folder as root and have Octave search for functions recursively there, just like you set a classpath in Java and JVM searches all folders there.
I used addpath(genpath('C:\\Users\Dropbox\Octave')), but the paths generated are then fixed, not reflecting subsequent subfolder changes.
Shall I add addpath(genpath('C:\\Users\Dropbox\Octave')) to the .octaverc file?
I think there is some confusion here. There are several ways to interact with the path, but for the most part these do not result in permanent changes, unless you save this somehow.
Simply adding a path for an existing octave session will not result in any permanent changes to the usual path that octave initialises at startup. Therefore when you say:
I used addpath(genpath('C:\Users\Dropbox\Octave')), but the paths generated are then fixed, not reflecting subsequent subfolder changes.
this makes no sense, because as soon as you exit your octave session, those added paths should have been gone altogether, and not appear in later octave sessions.
It is more likely that at some point you added these paths, and then used the savepath command, which resulted in your custom paths being added to your .octaverc file.
If that is the case, then yes, you can expect that octave will not "update" what was written in your .octaverc file, unless you call savepath again with an updated path definition.
If you would like the addpath(genpath('C:\Users\Dropbox\Octave')) command you mentioned to be called every time octave starts, so that the current/updated directory structure is loaded, then yes, the best way to do it would be to add that command to your .octaverc file. Make sure you remove the lines in your .octaverc that refer to the previous changes made by savepath. Note that there may be several levels of octaverc files that you need to check (see the relevant page in the manual)
Alternatively, you could simply make sure that this line appears in every script you want to call which intends to make use of those files.
While you may consider this last approach tedious, programmatically it is the most recommended one, since it makes dependencies clear in your code. This is especially important if you ever plan to share your code (and doubly so if you'd like it to be matlab compatible).
PS. All the above mostly applies to matlab too, with the exception that a) matlab's savepath saves path information in a file called pathdef.m, rather than directly in your startup files, and b) matlab uses startup.m instead of .octaverc as startup files. Also, if you don't care about doing this programmatically, matlab provides pathtool, which is a graphical interface for adding / saving directories to the matlab path.

read input from html forms, execute local program,output results

I have a question that will help me understand how stuff works and investigate feasibility of a bigger plan I have in mind.
Simply given - lets assume that all things run locally - I am wondering if it is possible to:
create an html page with a form that will prompt the user to enter
the local path of an input file inputFile.dat
this input file will be fed to a c++ exe program that expects it for input
the c++ exe file will run (this exe file depends on libraries etc but lets assume all are local here)
... and will output the result on screen
It sounds simple, but is it?
Many thanks folks!
Yes, this is definitely possible, if you want to use PHP or some other scripting language.
Create a form on your web page
Add the directory of the program
Add the directory of the data
When submitted, use the PHP (or other language) exec function (docs) to execute the program, with the supplied data as argument
The exec function returns output from the program.
Display the output as wished on your page.
Good luck!

The connection "C:\\<path>\\*.txt" is not found. This error is thrown by Connections collection when the specific conn element is not found

I developed a SSIS package that creates several .txt files. These files are zipped and then the .txt files need to be removed. Using a foreach file enumerator, I loop through all the .txt files for a specific folder. The folder is retrieved from a variable in configuration and looks something like: C:\Folder\
The foreach loop uses: *.txt to gather all .txt files, does not traverse subfolder and uses the full qualified name.
In the Variable Mappings the "FileName" variable gets filled with the 0 index.
Within the foreachloop I use a File system task.
This task removes the .txt files which are generated before, using the FileName variable that is filled in the loop.
On the development machine this runs like a charm. All greens, no problem at all. Now I copy the package and the configuration file to the test environment. A basic version without the file removing was running perfectly fine here. I replaced the package. Nothing big.
Now I run the SQl Server Agent Job and it starts running. I can see all the text files appearing, and disappearing after it created the zipfiles. However, when all files are removed the package results with errors. Namely the error shown above in the title.
I tried looking for the connectionmanager that might have been removed
Looked for connection managers named in the config that don't exist in the package.
No such thing found. Annoying part is that the package is fully functioning, but still results with the error.
EDIT: I noticed that if I run the package using the execute package utility with the dev. config it gives the same errors.
Hopefully someone is able to help me out.
Thanks in advance!
I managed to "fix" the issue. Remove the File System Component responsible for deleting the files. Then add it again and configure it again.
I think this happens if you accidentally change General parameters before changing the Operation parameter. It holds the metadata to irrelevant parameters and upon execution says: "Wait, you defined this parameter but I don't need it, but I'm checking for it anyway, and it's not there!"
It's a bug for sure

Packing a file into an ELF executable

I'm currently looking for a way to add data to an already compiled ELF executable, i.e. embedding a file into the executable without recompiling it.
I could easily do that by using cat myexe mydata > myexe_with_mydata, but I couldn't access the data from the executable because I don't know the size of the original executable.
Does anyone have an idea of how I could implement this ? I thought of adding a section to the executable or using a special marker (0xBADBEEFC0FFEE for example) to detect the beginning of the data in the executable, but I do not know if there is a more beautiful way to do it.
Thanks in advance.
You could add the file to the elf file as a special section with objcopy(1):
objcopy --add-section sname=file oldelf newelf
will add the file to oldelf and write the results to newelf (oldelf won't be modified)
You can then use libbfd to read the elf file and extract the section by name, or just roll your own code that reads the section table and finds you section. Make sure to use a section name that doesn't collide with anything the system is expecting -- as long as your name doesn't start with a ., you should be fine.
I've created a small library called elfdataembed which provides a simple interface for extracting/referencing sections embedded using objcopy. This allows you to pass the offset/size to another tool, or reference it directly from the runtime using file descriptors. Hopefully this will help someone in the future.
It's worth mentioning this approach is more efficient than compiling to a symbol, as it allows external tools to reference the data without needing to be extracted, and it also doesn't require the entire binary to be loaded into memory in order to extract/reference it.