path_createfolder() fails on Windows 8

Thijs Koerselman

In my external for windows I'm trying to create a folder in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files

This root folder exists.

With my previous win7 installation this wasn't a problem, but now on Windows 8.1 it returns error code -1. I'm thinking it might be because the security settings are more strict, but I tried lowering the UAC (user account control) to the minimum and I still get the same error.

Here's my code:

void MyExternal::createPaths(const char* rootname){

short rootpath;
char filename[PATH_MAX];

if(path_frompathname(rootname, &rootpath, filename)){
object_error((t_object*)this, "path_frompathname failed");
return;
}

DPOST("rootname %s", rootname);
DPOST("rootpath %i", rootpath);

short newpath;
int err = path_createfolder(rootpath, "SomeFolder", &newpath);
if(err){
object_error((t_object*)this, "create folder SomeFolder failed: %i", err);
return;
}

... and some more
}

This is the output in max:

rootname C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files
rootpath -361
myexternal: create folder SomeFolder failed: -1

Any idea why this might be happening?

So path_frompathname() returns 0 in this case but the rootpath value is set to -361. Is that a valid path identifier?

Under what type of circumstances can you get a -1 returned from path_createfolder()? I can't find any information in the docs on this subject.

Thijs Koerselman

Just for the record. I have figured this out since.

Yes -361 is a valid path identifier. The problem seemed to be that I was trying to create a folder in the program files directory. Not every user is allowed to do that. I've since used CSIDL_APPDATA instead of CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES_COMMONX86. I want this to create a common folder for my application that would persist outside the application bundle/folder, so CSIDL_APPDATA seems like the right choice anyway.

To get the path passed to the createPaths function mentioned in the previous post, I do something like this:

if(SUCCEEDED(SHGetFolderPath(NULL, 
            CSIDL_APPDATA | CSIDL_FLAG_CREATE,
                                 NULL, 
                                 0, 
                                 path))) 
        {
// do something with path

}

What I don't quite understand is that SHGetFolderPath returned with success also with CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES_COMMONX86 | CSIDL_FLAG_CREATE. I would expect that to fail if you're not allowed to create a path.

Hope this is useful to some one at some point