Name: mc57594 Date: 01/20/97


We are developing IBM and Lotus' AppletAuthor product, which is
written completely in Java
and is currently in Beta. (See www.ibm.com/java if you're interested in
downloading the Beta.)

In building a tool for Java written completely in Java, the need for
controlling the current directory has arisen.
With a tool, users use file dialogs in numerous places to select media files,
select which browser they want
to test with, etc. Each time they go through a file dialog, the current
directory is changed. When it comes time
to save their work for them, we need to be able to manually set the current
directory to the directory where
their work is without having to go through a file dialog. Attempts to do this
through the System and Property
classes have been futile, as it appears that system properties are intended to
be read only and it also
appears that the user.dir property is ignored by Java (at least on Win95).
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