From: Vik Heyndrickx <Vik DOT Heyndrickx AT rug DOT ac DOT be>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: Funny thing with _fixpath
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 09:45:41 +0100
Organization: University of Ghent, Belgium
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Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> That's exactly what `_fixpath' is supposed to do.  It canonicalizes the
> file name.  ``Canonicalizing'' means that it adds the drive and the
> current directory, if they aren't already there, and resolves "." and
> ".." if present.  It also does other useful things, like converting all
> slashes to forward variety; see the libc docs.

What canonicalizing actually means is that it yields a unique filename
for some file. That is its primary functioning; not converting slashes,
stripping dots, simplifying double-dots, making absolute, adding drive
letters, un-SUBST-ing, un-ASSIGN-ing, capitalizing, adding "x:/DEV/" for
devices and other weird things.

A canonicalizing function should be complete enough to help decide
whether two filenames refer to the same file.

-- 
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