Date: Thu, 26 Feb 1998 13:12:28 +0200 (IST)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Vik Heyndrickx <Vik DOT Heyndrickx AT rug DOT ac DOT be>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Funny thing with _fixpath
In-Reply-To: <34F52BB4.5C69@rug.ac.be>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.980226130913.6246C-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Precedence: bulk


On Thu, 26 Feb 1998, Vik Heyndrickx wrote:

> 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.

In addition to what I already wrote, I would be interested to know how to 
yield a unique file name spec without doing all these ``weird'' things 
(some of which `_fixpath' doesn't do, btw).  A unique name presumably 
means that you can find out whether any given two files are the same by 
doing a simple string comparison.  So how would you go about 
canonicalizing a file name if not by converting it to the shortest 
absolute path from the root?