Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!dutrun!dutinfd!oosten
From: oosten@dutinfd.UUCP (Gertjan van Oosten)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: A suggestion: .... == ../../..
Message-ID: <911@dutinfd.UUCP>
Date: 21 Apr 88 13:27:44 GMT
References: <75@vertical.oz> <1934@bgsuvax.UUCP> <2653@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Organization: Delft Univ. of Techn., Netherlands
Lines: 28
Summary: . .. ... .... ..... (getting pretty crowded here)


    Why do some of you want to add extra inodes for ... .... etc.?
    This could give you some trouble, like "File System Full"....

    What I mean is: where do you stop? Do you just want an entry for ...
    or also one for .... (okay, one more for the road: .....)???

    Aha, I hear you say, let's stop at the number of dots that would lead
    us to the root directory ('/' or '\', whatever).
    But here comes the big one:
    I want to be able to do "cd ...." in the root directory and still
    end up in the same root directory!
    (BTW: Novell Advanced NetWare lets you type "cd...." with the same
    meaning, no space!)

    The solution to all this is:
        do NOT create new inodes for ... etc.
    You don't need direct links to grandparent directories, great-grandparent
    directories, ..., because these links are already available via ../..,
    ../../.., ... . What I really want is the command interpreter to recognize
    things like "cd ..." and treat them as cd ../.. .

    Now, was that so hard??

              P.S. I like typing cd... far better than cd ..\.., simply
                   because them backslahes tend to crawl all over those
                   PC-keyboards (where is it now? Oh, to the left of the
                   shift key; no wait, it's next to the Esc :-) ).