From: huott AT pinebush DOT com (Ed Huott) Subject: UNC Names, '//' and mount 2 Jan 1997 12:47:30 -0800 Sender: daemon AT cygnus DOT com Approved: cygnus DOT gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Distribution: cygnus Message-ID: <199701021947.OAA23987.cygnus.gnu-win32@sol.pinebush.com> Original-To: gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com Original-Sender: owner-gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com First off, congratulations and many thanks to all the folks who have obviously put in much effort in porting the GNU tools/environment to the Windows 95/NT platforms. I've had a good deal of initial success at using gnumake along with bash and friends to allow us to use a common build environment for the NT port of a large, multi-platform Unix application. My experience with the tools and documentation so far is that they have all been first rate! Now for the subject of this post: I think it was noted some time ago that support for UNC path names might be problematic because of the convention for '//' being used to prefix a drive letter (e.g. '//x/' == 'x:\'). It seems like this might be unfortunate, especially since I'm not sure I understand the real need for the '//' drive letter convention. For example, what is the advantage to using: //x/foo when all the utilities understand: x:/foo or x:\\foo in the (bash) shell and x:\foo in cmd.exe? Especially when there is also the option of using the mount command: mount x:/ /x to get: /x/foo (This seems like the most elegant solution to me.) Is the extra convenience of '//' really worth losing the ability to do things like: ls '\\server\shared' (or: ls //server/shared) where '\\server\shared' is the UNC path to the "shared" directory resource on server "server"? Remember: dir \\server\shared is perfectly legal and often quite convenient under cmd.exe... I realize it may be too late and/or too unpopular to undo the '//' convention, but perhaps support for UNC path names can still be worked in? It could even work with the same syntax as long as you don't have servers named "A", "B", "C", etc! I hope these observations/suggestions can somehow be useful. -- Ed Huott Pinebush Technologies, Inc. - For help on using this list, send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".