Cog,

That was not a solution.
For http://example.com/foldera/folderb
base_path() . file_directory_path()
returns /foldera/folderb/files
only if Drupal is installed in the root of example.com

If Drupal is installed in folderb then
base_path() . file_directory_path()
returns /files
and that means that the full link (in browser) is
http://example.com/files
which is the problem I described.

I am trying Moshe's suggested solution that uses
url(file_directory_path(), NULL, NULL, TRUE)
which generates absolute http paths, which is a drawback, but I think it will be the solution.

Cheers,

Tomas



Cog Rusty wrote: 
On 9/21/07, Tomas J. Fulopp <tomi@vacilando.org> wrote:
  
I have one other question I am pondering for a crazy long time - I
wonder if it's a bug in the core...?

An user has Drupal installed in www.example.com/foldera/folderb/ and in
there a files folder ( thus www.example.com/foldera/folderb/files/ )

In my module, I need to determine the path to the 'files' folder
relative to the domain name (example.com)

So I've used file_directory_path() .. that gave me just 'files'.
Then I've used base_path() hoping that it would give me
/foldera/folderb/ this way
base_path() . file_directory_path()
but the result was
/files
    

file_directory_path() is a disk file path relative to drupal, and
base_path() is an URL path. So, using base_path() .
file_directory_path()

- when I access the site as http://example.com/foldera/folderb it
gives me "/foldera/folderb/files"
- when I access the site as http://subdomain.example.com it give me "/files"

But because it is an URL path, it is the same place and it works in
both cases as far as the web browser is concerned. Is there a reason
for your module to know the physical disk paths?


  
I see this issue was discussed at length at
http://lists.drupal.org/archives/support/2006-03/msg00042.html but there
are no clear conclusions, and anyway, that's a thread from March 2006.
So I wonder whether there is a clean solution for this.

I'm on Drupal 5.2, btw.

Tomas