From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: UNC with djgpp?
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 1999 11:29:51 +0200
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On Wed, 22 Dec 1999, Alain Magloire wrote:

> This is true on the Unix side,  in QNX, which has a distributed model,
> node could be access like this, for example getting a file on node161
> 
> 	less //161/etc/passwd
> 
> It turned out to be a pain, since many Unix utilities will smash
> the '//' to '/'.

This (and similar) problems are *exactly* at the core of the reason
for non-support of UNCs in DJGPP.  If you have a program that doesn't
take file names apart, but simply passes the UNCs unaltered to the DOS
calls, then most of the DOS calls, at least on Windows, would not
mind.

The problem is that some functions and most GNU programs *do* take
file names apart, and a small portion of DOS functions fail for UNCs
(and the failures vary depending on the installed network client ;-).
Imagine a situation where `stat' works, but `access' does not--it can
be very confusing and cause subtle bugs.

Getting all this straight is a royal pain, some of which I tried to
describe earlier in this thread.