Bug 2103 – import expression with relative path fails on Linux

This fails using dmd/dsss on Linux even when -J. is specified. string code = import("relative/file.txt"); Assuming your main.d is in . and there exists a file ./relative/file.txt. It should look relative to the current dir but for some reason it does not work on Linux. Works fine on Windows though. Making a symlink and importing "file.txt" instead is a workaround: ln -s relative/file.txt ./file.txt

*** Bug 2759 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

It works on Windows because of a bug where '/' was not recognized as a directory separator. The reason for the restriction against paths in the imports is to prevent remote execution exploits. Consider where compiling is done on a remote machine over a network. The remote machine needs to have control over what directory the import can read files from, otherwise there's a potential vector for attack. If you need to have multiple directories, they can all be specified on the command line as a list. I'm going to mark this as invalid as it is a deliberate design choice. You can reopen it as an enhancement request if you prefer, but I'll need convincing that relative paths don't leave a hole where an attacker could potentially try to read any file in the system. I figured it was best to be secure rather than sorry.