Function that gets a subdirectory of user-emacs-directory

Question

I remember reading about this function (it's part of Emacs) somewhere, but I can't for the life of me remember what it's called.

It takes a single argument arg (not sure if there's any more optional args)

• By default it looks for (expand-file-name arg "~/") and returns the path if it exists.
• If not, it looks for (expand-file-name arg user-emacs-directory) and returns the path if it exists.
• Otherwise, it creates the subdirectory in user-emacs-directory and returns the path.

Answer 1

You are looking for locate-user-emacs-file.

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Check out the below example code that,

• Creates abc/ sub-directory under user-emacs-directory if ~/abc/ doesn't already exist.
• Always returns the full directory path, whether it got created or not.
• Displays a message in the event the directory did not get created for some reason.

(let ((dir (locate-user-emacs-file "abc/")))
  (make-directory dir :parents)
  (when (not (file-directory-p dir))
    (message "%s directory was not created." dir))
  dir)