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From: davidsen@steinmetz.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.pc
Subject: Re: Silly question (accessing /)
Message-ID: <835@steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 15-Jul-86 22:16:14 EDT
Article-I.D.: steinmet.835
Posted: Tue Jul 15 22:16:14 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 16-Jul-86 22:33:04 EDT
References: <789@unirot.UUCP> <530@ecn-pc.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@kbsvax.UUCP (Davidsen)
Organization: GE CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 41

In article <530@ecn-pc.UUCP> sandersr@ecn-pc.UUCP (Robert C Sanders) writes:
>In article <789@unirot.UUCP> liz@unirot.UUCP (Mamaliz ) writes:
>>All of a sudden I am terribly confused.  The DOS technical reference tells
>>me that \ is not a file.  How do I find out what files are under it then?
>>Where do I find it?  I do not hack assembler and would really like to do
>>what I am doing in C.  So, how do people deal with the fact that root has
>>no . ?
>
>   Think of it this way: D:\ and D: are considered synomous for backwards
>compatibility -- where 'D' refers to a dr>check for '.', first call the DOS interupt 21H (most C libraries allow this)
>for the function that returns the current drive/path description as a string,
>and then strcmp() it to some "D:\".  If true (0), you now know the name of
>'.'.

Not true!! The string "D:" refers to "the current directory on drive
D:", while the string "D:\" refers to "the root directory on drive D:".
They are not, were not, and will not be the same!

Since many people don't believe me, assume that there is a directory
"foo" on drive D:, and the current drive is C:. Stuff after "#" is
comments:
  C>cd d:\		# current directory on D: is root
  C>dir D:		# list root dir on D:
  C>cd d:\foo		# current directory on D: is \foo
  C>dir D:		# list \foo directory on D:
  C:dir D:\		# list root directory on D:

I assume you understand and merely mistyped, but please don't confuse
the innocent on this. A drive name used without an *explicit* directory
refers to the current directory on that drive, which may very well not
be the root. This is useful when you do it on purpose...
-- 
	-bill davidsen

  ihnp4!seismo!rochester!steinmetz!--\
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"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward"