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From: jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: special cases and zero-length strings (was Re: To . or not to .)
Message-ID: <353@minya.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 8-Nov-87 08:10:12 EST
Article-I.D.: minya.353
Posted: Sun Nov  8 08:10:12 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Nov-87 02:37:04 EST
References: <648@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <722@wacsvax.OZ> <9171@mimsy.UUCP> <9203@mimsy.UUCP>
Organization: home
Lines: 25
Summary: "foo:" contains null name and works.

In article <9203@mimsy.UUCP>, chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
> [Background:  I claimed that */, a//b, and //x all have the
> zero-length string as a name component, and that SysV should
> therefore reject them.  Those of you who are tired of this debate
> should stop reading this article now.]
>
Yet another extension of the argument:  A couple of days ago, I found myself
with a new login id on a BSD machine which I needed to initialize to all the
stuff that I'm used to using.  Being lazy, I just copied stuff from my main
host:
	rcp -r foo: .

This worked just fine.  Then it occurred to me that I had used the dreaded
null file name.  The "foo:" string is of course parsable into the host name
"foo", a separator ':', and a directory name "".  Since rcp prepends your
home directory to anything not starting with '/', it acts just like you'd
expect.

I'm glad it did this sensibly, and didn't tell me that "" is an illegal
pathname.  There are too few hours in the day to waste them hassling with
silly software that won't do such straightforward, unambiguous commands
as the above because of someone's idea that null strings shouldn't exist.

-- 
John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)