1 Overview

(gnome vfs) wraps the GNOME Virtual Filesystem library for Guile. It is a part of Guile-GNOME.

The basic idea in this module is to map, as transparently as possible, GNOME-VFS files onto Scheme ports. Once you have a Scheme port, the native Scheme API is the preferred API. Other GNOME-VFS library procedures are defined that have no counterpart on the Scheme level, such as the MIME database procedures.

So, for example, to write to a file over SCP, you might do this:

     (define (with-output-to-port/dynamic make-port thunk)
       (let ((port #f))
         (dynamic-wind (lambda () (set! port (make-port)))
                       (lambda () (with-output-to-port port thunk))
                       (lambda () (close-port port) (set! port #f)))))
     
     (define (make-output-port uri-string exclusive?)
       (gnome-vfs-create
        (gnome-vfs-make-uri-from-input uri-string)
        'write exclusive? #o644))
     
     (with-output-to-port/dynamic
         (lambda ()
           (make-output-port "sftp://me@example.com/tmp/foo.txt" #t))
       (lambda ()
         (write "Hello world!")))

The dynamic-wind trickery is to ensure that the port is closed after execution leaves the thunk, and not left for GC to close in the future.

Exceptions raised during I/O are thrown to the gnome-vfs-error key, with the second argument being a symbol corresponding to a particular <gnome-vfs-result> value, such as error-file-exists.

To enable integration with the GNOME keyring, for SSH keys and the like, you will need to call (gnome-authentication-manager-init), which is a procedure defined in the (gnome gnome-ui) library.

This manual is admittedly a bit incomplete. Patches are accepted, of course, but the best thing to do would be eventually to wrap GIO, the new VFS layer that was pushed down into GLib.

See the documentation for (gnome gobject) for more information on Guile-GNOME.