On 06/22/2012 09:47 PM, Chet Ramey wrote: >> By accident I keyed in : >> >> cd // >> >> and noticed that my prompt included both slashes. > > Posix says shells have to leave two leading slashes in a pathname alone. > Three or more can be collapsed to one, but two have to stay unchanged. > This has come up multiple times in the past. > A little more info, quoting from the Autoconf manual:
POSIX lets implementations treat leading // specially, but requires leading /// and beyond to be equivalent to /. Most Unix variants treat // like /. However, some treat // as a "super-root" that can provide access to files that are not otherwise reachable from /. The super-root tradition began with Apollo Domain/OS, which died out long ago, but unfortunately Cygwin has revived it. HTH, Stefano
