Last week I finally managed to get speller to work on the small files that I crated for testing. However, when I try to check the correctness of the program using any of the methods outlines in the pset spec, I'm given the error that home/cs50/pset5/texts/austinpowers.txt couldn't load. Does anyone have an idea as to why that's happenning? I'd be much obliged :)


Assuming that you were very accurate above in copying the path that you used, you forgot the leading '/' in the path. Without it, you are asking for a directory relative to the current directory, and not an absolute path.

home/cs50/pset5/texts/austinpowers.txt and /home/cs50/pset5/texts/austinpowers.txt are two very different file locations, except when you are in the root directory of /.


  • Oh, I didn't copy the path in the question, so that's probably why it's missing the'/'. I'm very thorough with stuff like that when actually programming, and I checked a million times that everything was correctly typed. Any other ideas on why the problem's occurring? Sep 28 '15 at 20:49
  • Several ideas come to mind. The path/filename is wrong (directory doesn't exist or file isn't in directory), or permissions on the file or parent directories are wrong. Another possibility is a problem in the code. If the load function returns false for any reason, you will get this result. Is there a problem with your load function? That's my bet. ;-)
    – Cliff B
    Sep 28 '15 at 21:09
  • Agata: What version of the appliance are you on? Also, are you loading one of the default dictionaries or are you using one of your own? If you can load the default dictionary, you should be able to load the texts, cause they're in very similar paths. The question about appliance is because the old one had the text files in the pset6 directory, not pset5
    – Irene
    Sep 30 '15 at 0:57

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .