Subject: UNC Pathname Handling within Applications
From: Thorsten Haude <[email-masked]>
To: Cygwin ML <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 05:32:32 +0200

Hi,

I'm trying to find the best approach to solve a bug reported against
NEdit: 
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=873188&group_id=11005&atid=111005

The reporter complains that NEdit cannot open files from network
shares using Cygwin's double-slash notation. That is not suprising,
since NEdit silently drops any doubled slash before using the path.

I know that NEdit is not the only application ignoring multiplied
slashes, so I wonder how this is normally handled with Cygwin. Indeed,
a simple test on Linux seems to indicate that fopen() accepts any
number of slashes, so this is not isolated to NEdit.

- The user guide ("Mapping path names") does tell me something about
what's to expect but little about implementation.
- Googling brought me zilch, all involved words seem to be much too
generic to find anything, and Google does not search for slashes.
- I was also looking for another document (Posix?) to help here but
came up empty.

My questions:
- Is there any standard way to approach this problem? Has it come up
before in other applications?
- Do you know a resource which explains how Posix apps are expected to
handle paths like this?
- Does Cygwin offer another way around this problem? Could cygpath be
of any help?

Thank you very much for any pointers you can give me!

Thorsten
-- 
Auch Hunger ist Krieg.
    - Willy Brandt