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From: Danilo Turina <danilo DOT turina AT alcatel DOT it>
Subject: Re: PROPOSAL: translate '::' to '.' in arguments to the man command
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 10:05:12 +0100
Lines: 49
Message-ID: <3E3101C8.1010609@alcatel.it>
References: <000201c2c385$9a2be5b0$0201a8c0 AT ISIS>
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In-Reply-To: <000201c2c385$9a2be5b0$0201a8c0@ISIS>

Rafael Kitover wrote:
> I have noticed that some man pages, for example perl modules below the
> root namespace, are installed as Foo.Bar instead of Foo::Bar because
> apparently windows file names cannot contain "::". Eg.
> 
> $ touch 'Foo::Bar'  
> touch: creating `Foo::Bar': Invalid argument
> 
> This is sufficiently different from UNIX to trip most people up,
> especially those working with Perl. Further, filenames with one colon do
> work, e.g. Touch 'Foo:Bar'.

That's not completely true: ":" is an invalid character for Windows 
filenames.

	touch "Foo:Bar"

does not returns an error but does not create a file called "Foo:Bar", 
instead it creates a file called "Foo" and associate to it a NTFS stream 
(I think this is the correct name) to it.

If you try an ls you'll see that your directory contains a file called 
"Foo". But try, for example:

	echo Hello >> Foo
	echo Good morning >> "Foo:Bar"

	$ cat Foo
	Hello

	$ cat "Foo:Bar"
	Good morning

	$ rm Foo

	$ cat "Foo:Bar"
	cat: Foo:Bar: No such file or directory


> 
> For this reason I propose changing the "man" command in Cygwin to take
> the special case of "::" into account and convert it to a ".", iff the
> file containing "::" does not exist (might be supported in the future.)
> 
> If this is considered a good idea I'll be happy to make the patch.
> 
> Cheers,
> 



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