System Environment Variable pointing to RetroPie dir?

logiseye

Hey,

is there some kind of system environment variable (or similar method) to get retropie's dir?
I've just noticed some 3rd party scripts tend to use a hard coded path (e.g. /home/pi/RetroPie), which of course isn't always right. On my odroid I had to create the retropie user on my own, so it's not called pi but retropie instead.

An envvar would allow 3rd party tools to easily and dynamically locate the retropie dir.

HoraceAndSpider

This post is deleted!

HoraceAndSpider

@logiseye said in System Environment Variable pointing to RetroPie dir?:

Hey,

is there some kind of system environment variable (or similar method) to get retropie's dir?
I've just noticed some 3rd party scripts tend to use a hard coded path (e.g. /home/pi/RetroPie), which of course isn't always right. On my odroid I had to create the retropie user on my own, so it's not called pi but retropie instead.

An envvar would allow 3rd party tools to easily and dynamically locate the retropie dir.

Can you not create a symlink from /home/pi to /home/RetroPie ?

https://askubuntu.com/questions/600714/creating-a-symlink-from-one-folder-to-another-with-different-names

logiseye

Of course I could, but why not add a clean solution to RetroPie?
edit: And if someone else uses yet another directory, I'd have to add another symlink.

jdrassa

@logiseye scripts should be able to use ~/RetroPie. That will point to the RetroPie directory in the home directory of the current user.

logiseye

@horaceandspider Just tried your tip. Unfortunately e.g. UAE config maker fails, since not only /home/pi is burned in, but also the username pi (e.g. chown pi:pi gets called). And amiberry does seemingly not like symlinks.

Is pi the default so maybe I should resetup my system?

@jdrassa said in System Environment Variable pointing to RetroPie dir?:

@logiseye scripts should be able to use ~/RetroPie. That will point to the RetroPie directory in the home directory of the current user.

As long as they don't run as root, that's correct.

jdrassa

@logiseye pi is the default user when running on raspberry pi, but it can be anything on other systems. I would recommend contacting the the creator of the script and request that they make it more generic.

HoraceAndSpider

@logiseye said in System Environment Variable pointing to RetroPie dir?:

@horaceandspider Just tried your tip. Unfortunately e.g. UAE config maker fails, since not only /home/pi is burned in, but also the username pi (e.g. chown pi:pi gets called). And amiberry does seemingly not like symlinks.

@logiseye scripts should be able to use ~/RetroPie. That will point to the RetroPie directory in the home directory of the current user.

All the paths on UAE Config Maker can be changed using the command-line options:

--scandirs
--outputdir
--rom-path

The RetroPie Menu script, you are correct, does use a chown to 'pi' but that can be manually edited, and the script is only provided for less technical users, and is not really the suggested running method.

I will look at switching to ~/RetroPie by default however which seems a clean solution