dominating-file.el

;; Port this functionality back from Emacs 23 since it's Really Useful

(unless (functionp 'locate-dominating-file)
  (defun locate-dominating-file (file name)
    "Look up the directory hierarchy from FILE for a file named NAME.
Stop at the first parent directory containing a file NAME,
and return the directory.  Return nil if not found."
    ;; We used to use the above locate-dominating-files code, but the
    ;; directory-files call is very costly, so we're much better off doing
    ;; multiple calls using the code in here.
    ;;
    ;; Represent /home/luser/foo as ~/foo so that we don't try to look for
    ;; `name' in /home or in /.
    (setq file (abbreviate-file-name file))
    (let ((root nil)
          (prev-file file)
          ;; `user' is not initialized outside the loop because
          ;; `file' may not exist, so we may have to walk up part of the
          ;; hierarchy before we find the "initial UID".
          (user nil)
          try)
      (while (not (or root
                      (null file)
                      ;; FIXME: Disabled this heuristic because it is sometimes
                      ;; inappropriate.
                      ;; As a heuristic, we stop looking up the hierarchy of
                      ;; directories as soon as we find a directory belonging
                      ;; to another user.  This should save us from looking in
                      ;; things like /net and /afs.  This assumes that all the
                      ;; files inside a project belong to the same user.
                      ;; (let ((prev-user user))
                      ;;   (setq user (nth 2 (file-attributes file)))
                      ;;   (and prev-user (not (equal user prev-user))))
                      (string-match locate-dominating-stop-dir-regexp file)))
        (setq try (file-exists-p (expand-file-name name file)))
        (cond (try (setq root file))
              ((equal file (setq prev-file file
                                 file (file-name-directory
                                       (directory-file-name file))))
               (setq file nil))))
      root))

  (defvar locate-dominating-stop-dir-regexp
    "\\`\\(?:[\\/][\\/][^\\/]+\\|/\\(?:net\\|afs\\|\\.\\.\\.\\)/\\)\\'"))

(provide 'dominating-file)