How to work with file system in linux within a JSF app?

Question

I use this line in my backing bean to log some events:
FileHandler fhxml = new FileHandler("../webapps/MyWebApp/Log/MyWebAppLog.xml", append);
fhxml.setFormatter(new XMLFormatter());That works fine in windows but when I deploy it in my Tomcat 6 in linux It doesn't work. How can I work with file system in linux?

Answer 1

You should never use relative paths to access the filesystem. The path would be relative to the current working directory which is not per se the same in all environments. To convert a relative web path to an absolute file system path, you need ServletContext#getRealPath(). Use this absolute file system path in the java.io stuff. In a JSF application on top of Servlet API you can get the underlying ServletContext by ExternalContext#getContext().
Alternatively, if the file is located in one of the default paths of the classpath or if its path is added to the classpath, you can also just use ExternalContext#getResource() or even #getResourceAsStream() using just the file name.