Thread: FileNotFoundException!?

Hey folks,

Having a bit of trouble understanding what the problem is. I created a text file that is a list of about 200 or so items, arranged one item per line as such:

item1
item2
item3
...item200

My class file FumeTracker.class is in it's own directory along with two other directories, "dat" and "profiles". The text file is saved inside the "dat" directory.

Here is the code that's throwing the exception:

import java.io.*;
 
public class FumeTracker {
 
	public static void main(String [] args) throws IOException{
		BufferedReader hr = null;
 
		try{
			hr = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("//dat//herbmasterlist.txt"));
			String h;
			while((h = hr.readLine()) != null){
				System.out.println(h);
			}
		}finally{
			if (hr != null)
				hr.close();
		}
	}
 
}

The key here is that this program will eventually need to run on multiple systems (windows, mac or linux) and be extracted to whatever directory the user wants, as long as my directory structure remains in tact (ie my dat and profile directories must stay in the same parent directory that the executable will be in) so I don't want to hard code an absolute path.

Any suggestions on how I might get this workin? Any help is appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
~Shad

Try using single / vs //

Thank you for your suggestion. Unfortunately, that was not the (only?) issue

I am using Eclipse, not sure if that matters. I am also using a Unix machine, my daughter's in fact (only relevant because the user directory is cassandra, see below lol)

This is the working directory order

/home/cassandra/workspace

contains the directory FumeTracker and a copy of herbmasterlist.txt

/home/cassandra/workspace/FumeTracker

contains the directories bin and src

/home/cassandra/workspace/FumeTracker/bin

contains the directories dat and profiles, as well as a copy of herbmasterlist.txt and
FumeTracker.class (I managed to get it to compile once by hard coding the full path)

profiles directory is empty

/home/cassandra/workspace/FumeTracker/src

contains FumeTracker.java and a copy of herbmasterlist.txt


I apologize if this is all extraneous information. There are 3 copies of my .txt file because I don't know what Java considers the home directory in a running program, so I'm not sure what the relative path should be. If it's the same directory that the class resides in, then I should be able to simply write "herbmasterlist.txt" because I have a copy in that dir as well, but that won't work either.

If I could figure out which directory the program checks when no other directories are specified in a file name, then maybe that could clue me in as to where I'm going wrong.

Thanks again in advance,

~Shad

If I could figure out which directory the program checks

Salt all the possible directories with the same named file but with a different contents.
Run the program and look at the contents of the file that is read. That will tell you which file was read from where.