Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!torsqnt!lethe!druid!darcy
From: darcy@druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain)
Subject: Re: Thompson Toolkit (was Re: Where can I get MKS toolkit?)
Message-ID: <1991Jun14.142925.20977@druid.uucp>
Organization: D'Arcy Cain Consulting, West Hill, Ontario
References: <1991Jun14.031553.7236@midway.uchicago.edu>
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 91 14:29:25 GMT

In article <1991Jun14.031553.7236@midway.uchicago.edu> Doug Dougherty writes:
>Could someone explain to me why it is more "Unix-ish" to have C:foo mean
>C:\foo instead of C:.\foo?  The later is obviously what the user
>intends; the former is just a bug.

It's only obvious to a DOS user.  For those that don't know how the unix
file system works, there is no concept of drives.  All physical drives
including hard disks, floppies etc. are simply mounted as a directory
on the primary file system.  For example if I have a file system on a
floppy with the file "dir1/dir2/file" that I would like to access then
I mount the floppy somewhere on my system.  Perhaps I mount it in my
home directory (which BTW is already on a mounted file system) on a
directory called mnt.  Now the file name I want can be referred to as
/usr/darcy/mnt/dir1/dir2/file.

Now, how does MKS deal with drives while making it look as Unixish as
possible?  I don't know for sure but I suspect that they treat the
various drives as mounted drives on the root and so the most logical
way to deal with C:foo is as if /C/foo was typed where "C" is the
mounted hard disk.  Since Unix has the concept of current directory
but not of current drive the concept of a "current" position on a 
directory that you are not currently in is counter-intuitive.  It
would be like trying to refer to "file" in the above example as
/usr/darcy/mnt/file because the system somehow knows that mnt really
means/mnt/dir1/dir2.
-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain (darcy@druid)     |
D'Arcy Cain Consulting             |   There's no government
Toronto, Ontario, Canada           |   like no government!
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