Client Current Dir

The Client_Current_Dir config specification.

CLIENT_CURRENT_DIR   full_pathname_on_client | SYNC

This path will be passed to Windows as the Starting Directory during subsequent client shell calls. This statement can be specified in the configuration file and also can be called dynamically with the CONFIG command.

The 'SYNC' value indicates keep the client in sync with the server. Each time a CD is performed on the server a corresponding CD is issued on the client. This requires that the second parameter of the BR drive statements match the server operating system drive mappings.

If a Client_Current_Dir statement is subsequently executed which specifies a directory (instead of SYNC) then no further attempt will be made to correlate client and server current directories.

If Client_Current_Dir statement specifies SYNC, then a CD is performed on the client to match the current server path, when the config statement is processed.

From that point on all subsequent server CD commands (done in BR) are mirrored on the client, for example:

CLIENT_CURRENT_DIR  SYNC

To use this feature any OS drive letter specified in a CD command must map to the logical drive letter (first parameter) in the corresponding DRIVE statement, and the server root directory (as viewed by the client) must be the starting directory of the path specified in the second parameter of the DRIVE statement.

For example, let's say a Linux server has a path /wrk/user/br/ that contains the application, and Samba defines /wrk/ as the root directory on drive J. Then in this case the client sees "user" as the first subdirectory below the root, and the corresponding DRIVE statement should be:

DRIVE J:,/wrk/,x,\user\br

This sets the BR current working directory to \user\br.

Then if the BRCONFIG.SYS file contained "CLIENT_CURRENT_DIR SYNC", a CD DATA would set the current BR directory to J:\user\br\data on both the client and the server.

This is useful for COPY filename @:filename2 commands (copies to and from the client). Note that correlation of Samba drives with the second parameter of BR Drive statements is also useful for ODBC and SPOOLCMD purposes.