On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 05:35:38PM +0100, Niels M�ller wrote: > Marcus Brinkmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > You will have to find an extension outside of POSIX. This discussion came > > up in the Austin group a year ago or so, where some people wanted to have > > a reserved name space for such data, like ..., or whatever you can think of. > > One way might be to attach "/foo" at the end of a name of a *file*. If > "bar" is a file, POSIX requires that "bar/" should be equivalent to > "bar",
Wrong. Recent versions of the draft require that "bar/" is equal to "bar/." (if the last character is a slash, it should behave as if a dot follows the slash). > but "bar/foo" is meaningless and trying to use that name will > just result in some error. Right? So extending POSIX by assigning a > meaning to such names seems reasonably safe. And we're almost doing > that already, with nodes that support both file and directory > operations. You can do such funky things. I am not sure how well it would word in real work. And, you can not attach metadata to directories this way :) BTW, when I said that two slashes are like one, it is true with one exception. For some strange reason, a pathname that starts with exactly two (no more, no less) slashes is implementation defined. So you have the whole //foo/bar namespace... I don't know why this exception was made, probably for some OS I don't know about. It could be used, but I would be prepared to fix some scripts etc to not accidentially but a slash too much in the line. ///foo/bar etc is equivalent to /foo/bar. Same for even more slashes. Thanks, Marcus -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
