It's worth mentioning here that
SCons maintains a clear distinction
between Nodes that represent files
and Nodes that represent directories.
functions that, repectively,
return a file or directory Node:
hello_c = File('hello.c') Program(hello_c) classes = Dir('classes') Java(classes, 'src')
Normally, you don't need to call
because calling a builder method automatically
treats strings as the names of files or directories,
and translates them into
the Node objects for you.
Dir functions can come in handy
in situations where you need to explicitly
instruct SCons about the type of Node being
passed to a builder or other function,
or unambiguously refer to a specific
file in a directory tree.
There are also times when you may need to
refer to an entry in a file system
without knowing in advance
whether it's a file or a directory.
For those situations,
SCons also supports an
which returns a Node
that can represent either a file or a directory.
xyzzy = Entry('xyzzy')
The returned xyzzy Node will be turned into a file or directory Node the first time it is used by a builder method or other function that requires one vs. the other.