@kyro Thank you!

@kyro This looks interesting. Do you have a sample patch?

I found a way that works:

@whale-av Thanks. Where would I get concat? It isn't listed in deken. Is there a way to do this in vanilla Pd?

When I put 0111 in a symbol object, or in a symbol message, Pure Data deletes the leading zero. I need the leading zero to be there because it is the start of a file name. How do I get Pure Data to stop deleting the leading zero?

@mosef123 You're also missing edge~, so you probably need the cyclone library. There are a number of tutorials that tell you how to make your own oscilloscope. Here's one:

The dashed box around speedlim means that you don't have that object. You should have gotten a message in red on the pd console to indicate that problem. There are several external libraries that include speedlim. You need to decide which one to use. Where did you get the oscilloscope subpatch? It would be a good idea to use the same speedlim that they used.

@whale-av Thanks! This looks promising. I'll give it a try.

Edit: That worked thanks!

@Balwyn Your [file cwd] example looks like exactly what I need, but it didn't work with read. Your example with the close, open message works on my system, but when I tried to use the read message to read the file, I got a "can't read" message. Any ideas on how I can make this work? Thanks!

Edit: I opened issue #2888 on github for the problem that [file cwd] doesn't work with read.

Thank you, @unclewayback and @whale-av for your replies, but that doesn't solve my problem. The example I gave was a simplified version of what I'm doing. I have 129 files in each directory. The file names are the same in all the directories. (There are three directories now, but there will soon be more.) I have a selectable list of file names and I want to be able to open whatever file was selected in the currently selected directory. I'm currently using $1 in the read message to pass in the selected file name, so I can't use it for the directory name. Is there a way to put two variables in the read message?