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From: jbw@bucsf.UUCP (Joe Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: bug in substitute-in-file-name
Message-ID: <48470@bbn.COM>
Date: 19 Nov 89 06:31:37 GMT
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In article <1319@sas.UUCP> sasdjb@sas.UUCP (David Biesack) writes:

   substitute-in-file-name does not work properly on
   Apollo Domain/OS GNU Emacs. The problem seems to occur when
   an environment variable contains a pathname which begins
   with //hostname, as shown in a log below:

   [stuff deleted]

   The substitution of $JJ causes a loss of the string up to the
   //javelin in the environment variable! The second substitute,
   with env var KK works properly.

This is explained by the following comment taken from the source for
substitute-in-file-name in src/fileio.c:

  /* If /~ or // appears, discard everything through first slash. */

Presumably, this is desirable behavior.  I think the problem is that it is
not well documented that substitute-in-file-name is intended to work on
file names, not on strings in general.

Congratulations on the first properly done bug report I've seen in a long
time!

--
Joe Wells <jbw@bucsf.bu.edu>
jbw%bucsf.bu.edu@bu-it.bu.edu
...!harvard!bu-cs!bucsf!jbw