Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!rutgers!cbmvax!jesup
From: jesup@cbmvax.UUCP (Randell Jesup)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Enviroment (was Re: Yea, but can an Amiga Shell do this....)
Message-ID: <4660@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: 4 Sep 88 08:21:31 GMT
References: <8808232121.AA28517@cory.Berkeley.EDU> <10580@stb.UUCP>
Reply-To: jesup@cbmvax.UUCP (Randell Jesup)
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 61

In article <10580@stb.UUCP> michael@stb.UUCP (Michael) writes:
>A colon followed by a slash may be an error (is it assigned to a subdir?)

	It is an error.

>N+1 non-initial consecutive slashes refers to N parents
>N initial slashes refers to N parents

	It's all a matter of how of how you tokenize (in your mind or
otherwise) the pathname.  If you (in your mind) include the / at the end
of a directory name, it makes sense.  Think of walking through the path
left to right, handling it as you go.

>There is no easy way to take the name of a directory and append a file
>	name to it.

	Define easy.

>Tell you what: You give me a routine that will take two names, one a
>directory, one a file, and return me a pathname for the file. Handle
>ending slashes, null directories, assigned devices, assigned directories,
>files beginning with slashes, etc. AND make it usable in CLI scripts.
>Then, I will consider the Amiga's file system naming useably clean.

	ok

	char *foo (char *dir,char *file)
	{
		/* I assume dir can be extended here */
		int  dirlen = strlen(dir);
		char lastchar;

		if (dirlen) {
			lastchar = dir[dirlen-1];
			if (lastchar != ':' && lastchar != '/')
				strcat(dir,"/");
		}
		strcat(dir,file);
		return dir;
	}

	It can be much more efficient, but I wrote for clarity.

	As for "use in shell scripts", I don't understand you at all.
Which shell, used how?  AmigaDos CLI, AmigaDos Shell (1.3), Dillon's shell,
TShell, Wsh, something else?

	File _names_ cannot have slashes in them (by definition).

>(under non-v7 unix, this routine is arg1 + "/" + arg2. V7 allowed "" for
>current directory, so it would be (*arg1 == 0? "./" : arg1 + "/") + arg2
>(+ == strcat))

	It's more complicated than unix, but then it supports removable
media better than Unix does, and I (for one) find it easier to deal with
than typing 3 characters per directory up, instead of one.  This is
especially true when combined with a shell that does an implicit cd when
you type a directory name.

-- 
Randell Jesup, Commodore Engineering {uunet|rutgers|allegra}!cbmvax!jesup