Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!husc6!cmcl2!brl-adm!brl-smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Portable Pathname Parsing (was: Is NULL == 0 always true?)
Message-ID: <7028@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: 11 Jan 88 08:15:23 GMT
References: <134@soleil.UUCP> <7013@brl-smoke.ARPA> <3474@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 26

In article <3474@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu> randy@umn-cs.UUCP (Randy Orrison) writes:
>	-- '\' is not nonportable, it's illegal

I was actually thinking of an obscure interpretation of "implementation-
defined", but it isn't unless there is another ' somewhere later on the
line.  Clearly what was intended, however, was miscoded.

>Since ANSI C is intended to maximize portablility of programs,

Within reason!  We cannot constrain operating systems unduly; that's
beyond the scope of X3J11.

>..., does dpANS include any provision for portable handling of paths?

No, because some important OSes don't have hierarchical file systems.

The best we could do was to define some guaranteed minimalistic
filenames for use with #include "", and even that took a lot of
discussion and negotiation with people having difficult OSes.

>Or, is this too much an operating system thing and not a C language thing?

Exactly.

Note that the proposed IEEE Std 1003.1 (POSIX) specifies some things
about pathname syntax and semantics for UNIX-like systems.