Subject: Re: UNC path syntax
From: [email-masked] (Ed Huott)

1 Apr 1997 15:51:12 -0800
Approved: [email-masked]
Distribution: cygnus
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Original-To: [email-masked] (Tom Yonkman)
Original-cc: [email-masked]
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 31 Mar 1997 14:01:35 PST."
             <[email-masked]> 
Original-Sender: [email-masked]

In message <[email-masked]>, Tom Yonkman writes:
>     Just started using the gnu-win32 package and wonder if ls and friends 
>     can handle the UNC path syntax in some way? This would allow access to 
>     machines in my "Network Neighborhood", as the explorer so quaintly 
>     puts it.
>     

No.  Nothing built with cygwin32 can deal with UNC path names.  The
cygwin32 approach requires that you map a drive to any remote (network
neighborhood) volumes.  Inside the bash shell, a mapped network drive
such as N: can then be referenced using the path "//N".  This syntax
can, unfortunately, collide with the most logical choice for
referencing a network share, which would be something like:
"//ComputerName/SharedDrive".

There is a unix-like volume mounting scheme that lets you acces a
drive as a sub-directory (i.e. N: ==> /DriveN) something like the old
DOS "join" command, but this works *only* for apps built with
cygwin32.

Lack of UNC support can be a real drawback if you're dealing in an
environment that uses a mix of both native (Windows) and cygwin32
apps.

<ED>
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