Subject: Re: File name syntax (WAS: RE: FW: Can not config sshd)
From: "Larry Hall (RFK Partners, Inc)" <[email-masked]>
To: Bob McGowan <[email-masked]>, "Parker, Ron" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 May 2000 13:46:26 -0500

At 12:22 PM 5/26/00, Bob McGowan wrote:
> > 
> > Which makes me wonder would a patch to cygwin be welcome that did the
> > following?
> > 
> > * Make multiple introductory slashes on a path behave as a single
> > introductory slash
> > * Make paths that begin with name: and contain no backslashes behave as a
> > network path
> > 
> > In other words, "///myfile" would translate to "/myfile" and
> > "machine:dir/file" or "machine:/dir/file" would map to the Windows path
> > \\machine\dir\file.
> > 
>
>I would endorse this, since it would make the operation of Cygwin more
>'unix like'.  All unix systems I'm familiar with (mostly SVR3 and SVR4
>derived) treat a '//' the same as '/./' so a path that comes up looking
>like //usr/src
>is handled correctly.  I would speculate that this was done so the root
>user's home directory '/' would work correctly with absolute path names
>generated elsewhere.
>
>Currently Cygwin treats multiple slashes in a path (abc//xyz) in this
>way, anyway, so doing so for leading slashes would also make the
>operation consistent.

The problem with this is it would disallow the use of UNC paths.  To avoid  
this, care would be needed to avoid collapsing the initial "//" to "/".
However, my guess is that excluding the initial "//" works against the goal
that Ron was originally envisioning (i.e. the elimination of subtle errors 
resulting from erroneous occurrences of "//", in addition to "///", "////",
etc).  Seems to me like this goal may well be addressed by simply having bash 
handle an undefined HOME variable more appropriately, like perhaps what 
Earnie suggested.

I see no obvious problem with the introduction of the NFS path scheme.  Its a
bit "non-standard" for UNIX outside of NFS circles but then again, so is UNC.

Larry Hall                              [email-masked]
RFK Partners, Inc.                      http://www.rfk.com
118 Washington Street                   (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
Holliston, MA 01746                     (508) 893-9889 - FAX
                                        (508) 560-1285 - cell phone

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