Subject: Re: Mounts and relative pathnames
From: [email-masked] (Larry Hall)

11 Mar 1998 04:14:10 -0800
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
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To: Kenneth Chiu <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]

At 11:58 AM 3/9/98 -0500, Kenneth Chiu wrote:
>I seem to have a problem with 'ls' and relative pathnames.  I have
>searched the FAQ and the mailing list archives, but haven't found
>anything.  Suppose I do the following sequence:
>
>    mount N:/root /
>    mount N:/dir1 /usr
>    cd /
>    ls usr
>
>I would expect to see the contents of N:/dir1, but instead I see
>nothing.  If I type 'ls /usr', I see what I expect, so I think I'm
>executing the correct 'ls'.  If I type 'cd usr', and then 'ls', I
>also see what I expect.  Here is what my mount table actually looks
>like:
>
>Device                        Directory           Type        Flags
>N:\Cygnus\B19\H-i386-cygwin32 /usr                native      text!=binary
>N:\tmp                        /tmp                native      text!=binary
>\\.\tape1:                    /dev/st1            native      text!=binary
>\\.\tape0:                    /dev/st0            native      text!=binary
>\\.\b:                        /dev/fd1            native      text!=binary
>\\.\a:                        /dev/fd0            native      text!=binary
>N:\root                       /                   native      text!=binary
>

To be sure, the semantics of mount are not quite the same as they are on
UNIX systems but keep in mind what is necessary to mount on UNIX systems!
There you have to create a directory to mount to (in this case 'usr') 
before the mount would succeed.  Now, granted, if you follow this procedure,
its likely not going to work quite as you expect either.  Welcome to beta
software.  mount has its problems.  I find that creating a symbolic link 
solves this particular problem (OK, its a work-around) although there are
still a few "uglies" that occur for mount that symbolic links won't resolve.
To be honest, it looks to me like symbolic links afford all the high-level
functionality that mounting is supposed to provide (except for binary/text 
file support) with less side effects.  Check it out and see if you don't 
agree.

Larry Hall                              [email-masked]
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (781) 239-1053
8 Grove Street                          (781) 239-1655 - FAX
Wellesley, MA  02181                    http://www.rfk.com
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