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From: dce@mips.UUCP (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: To . or not to .
Message-ID: <905@quacky.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 13-Nov-87 13:57:46 EST
Article-I.D.: quacky.905
Posted: Fri Nov 13 13:57:46 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Nov-87 10:26:18 EST
References: <648@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <9171@mimsy.UUCP> <972@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <9363@tekecs.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: dce@quacky.UUCP (David Elliott)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 32

In article <9363@tekecs.TEK.COM> snoopy@doghouse.gwd.tek.com (Snoopy) writes:
>In article <972@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> lvc@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Lawrence V. Cipriani) writes:
>>This nice thing about doing it this way is that you can be a little
>>sloppy in your program and it will still work.  I admit it I'm lazy!
>>And what is the harm anyway?
>
>The harm is that this is not portable.  With UTek's DFS, //a refers to the
>root directory on a machine called 'a'.  I've seen articles indicating
>that Apollo's multi-machine file system (whatever they call their version)
>uses the same syntax.  (Is anyone familiar with Apollo out there?)
>
>Sloppy programming is not a good idea.

It's even more unportable, since the Apollo semantics differ when there
are more than two slashes.

That is //a means the root on machine 'a'. ///a means the same on the
Apollo, but with DFS it means the same thing as /a. This allowed us
to quickly fix sloppy code by changing sprintf's that use things like

	sprintf(path, "%s/%s", ...)

to use //, though I think we tried to fix them all the right way.

In addition, we changed the home of users like root to be "/.", so
that programs that use "$HOME/path" wouldn't produce "//path" for
root.

I have mixed feelings about all of this, but I do hope that the V8
style (/n/host/...) will win out.
-- 
David Elliott		dce@mips.com  or  {ames,decwrl,prls}!mips!dce