Mail Archives: cygwin/2004/05/12/12:18:06
On Wed, May 12, 2004 at 05:43:32PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On May 12 16:17, Dave Korn wrote:
> > I reckon you could quote
> > http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap04.html#tag_0
> > 4_11
> > to support the claim that what bash is doing is actually an invalid
> > transformation and should be considered a bug. That page says
> >
> > "A pathname consisting of a single slash shall resolve to the root directory
> > of the process. A null pathname shall not be successfully resolved. A
> > pathname that begins with two successive slashes may be interpreted in an
> > implementation-defined manner, although more than two leading slashes shall
> > be treated as a single slash."
> >
> > Therefore translating "/" to "//" has the effect of replacing an
> > unambiguous specs-defined interpretation with an implementation-defined
> > interpretation and is clearly invalid, even though it amounts to a null
> > tranformation on many *nix systems.
>
> Looking into the bash code, you'll see that this is a well-known fact
> to the bash developers. This bug just couldn't be easily uncovered,
> since it doesn't result in wrong behaviour on any system so far. Sheer
> luck that two bugs met each other :-)
>
I would argue that Corinna's change is a good temporary patch, until bash
is fixed, but that in the long run we should just apply the Posix law.
Allowing // to mean / gives strange results:
~> /bin/ls //
alt
bin
<snip>
~> /bin/ls -l //
/bin/ls: //alt: No such file or directory
/bin/ls: //bin: No such file or directory
<snip>
~> /bin/ls "/ . ."
alt
bin
(1.5.9 also screws up on that one, but in a different way)
Pierre
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