Subject: Re: Question / comment about DIRECTORY From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 00:08:24 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3213389302532292@naggum.net> * Kent M Pitman | And I bet it's the community that tolerates all of those /'s in the | manner that Rob cites that is always saying to the other "you guys use | too many /'s" just as people always say of Lisp "you guys use too many | parens". [...] (Almost) paradoxically, it's the toleration of extra | notational devices like that that steals meaning from them. | | It's a shame that extra /'s are tolerated as they are. It must hide all | kinds of program errors that really ought to be fixed. Actually, foo//bar is valid for a very different reason than most people seem to believe. The empty string was a valid pathname, and it resolved to the current directory, the same value as ".", except it did not use consult the inode for ".". The kernel routine "namei" started with this value and returned it if it got the empty string. foo//bar is processed the standard way, where the empty string is the current directory as it in the parsing process. It is quite likely that treating an empty string as a pathname was a bug that got exploited because of its convenience. /// -- Norway is now run by a priest from the fundamentalist Christian People's Party, the fifth largest party representing one eighth of the electorate. -- Carrying a Swiss Army pocket knife in Oslo, Norway, is a criminal offense.