fits.bat file only works if launched from FITS installation directory

[bitsgalore]

If I run the fits.bat file from any directory that is not the FITS installation directory (which I think is the most common case, at least it is for me!), this results in the following error messages:

The system cannot find the path specified.
Error: Could not find or load main class edu.harvard.hul.ois.fits.Fits

Part of the problem seems to be this line:

set PRGDIR=%~p0

Which strips away the drive letter (I can see this from the value of environment variable PRGDIR, which in my case reads:

PRGDIR=\fits\

I think it should really be:

PRGDIR=c:\fits\

This can be fixed by using %~dp0 instead of %~p0:

set PRGDIR=%~dp0

However even then I keep getting the error, so there's more to this (but I don't have time for an in-depth investigation now). The following line looks a bit wrong to me as well:

cd %FITS_HOME%

(Why would you want to do that?)

This might apply to the shell script as well (but I didn't test it).

Side note: I already reported this bug to Harvard late summer 2011 (and they replied they were already aware of this issue by then). So I'm a bit surprised to see that almost 3 years onwards this bug is still there (or maybe nobody's using the batch file?).

[spmcewen]

Hi Yohan. I think this simply fell down the priorities list. I also don't have easy access to a Windows machine, nor am I all that familiar with Windows .bat files so there has definitely been less testing there.

[bitsgalore]

Update: I think I already found a solution for this. Stay tuned ...