[GRLUG] Paths

[Greg Folkert]

On Sun, 2008-09-21 at 08:52 -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > > Is this a feature - or am I missing the point about something - and secondly
> > > would it be wise to allow this behaviour in my program for when an
> > > individual specifies a path?
> > It's common behavior on Linux; Having to path delimiters (//) gets
> > collapsed, though I'm not sure where it happens.  In any case, if it's
> > a behavior that's everywhere and that people may depend on, it would
> > break the user's expectations for you to disallow it in your own code.
> 
> Treating doubles ["//"] slashes in a path as a single slash is a
> requirement of POSIX.  This it should be supporting everywhere on any
> UNIX or UNIX-like platform.

Uhh, what is POSIX? 

Surprisingly Wikipedia is pretty good on this particular one:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX

Of course, you can pay for the real definition.

> > An example where it's useful: If you have a shell variable $VAR that's
> > a path to a directory, and you want to put something in that
> > directory, you can simply say $VAR/filename.  If $VAR already has a
> > trailing /, the additional one gets collapsed into it.
-- 
greg at gregfolkert.net
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