paths like //usr/local

[Christopher Faylor]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 03:51:19PM -0400, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
>On Tue, 15 Oct 2002, [ISO-8859-1] Sven Köhler wrote:
>
>> >>a path like //usr/local is treated as an UNC path.
>> >>this might leads to problems when an application is using //usr/local as
>> >>a normal "unix"-path.
>> >>
>> >>i don't know how to overcome the problem, but one might think of a path
>> >>like /unc/computer/share instead of using the path //computer/share
>> >>
>> >>what was the idea behind the current behaviour?
>> >
>> > Do you think that Microsoft employees read this mailing list?  I'm sure
>> > that there are one or two but I doubt that they could speak definitively
>> > about why Microsoft chose this behavior.
>>
>> cygwin translates paths like /usr/local to c:\cygwin\usr\local and
>> manages mount-points etc...
>> cygwin opffers a complete "virtual filesystem"
>>
>> the cygwin-developers chose, to NOT convert //usr/local to
>> c:\cygwin\usr\local
>>
>> i would like to know why.
>
>Sven,
>Basically your complaint is inconsistent behavior of multiple contiguous
>slashes depending on where they occur in the path (i.e., the initial two
>slashes won't be collapsed, but elsewhere in the path they will be).
>Perhaps something like a unc_prefix is in order, similar to the cygdrive
>prefix?
>"Patches gratefully accepted" (C).  Oops, sorry, I guess it's "Donations
>gleefully accepted" now... :-D

Not in this case.  There is no way that I'm going to change long-standing
behavior in cygwin.

To quote from the Single Unix Specification v3:

"A pathname consisting of a single slash shall resolve to the root
directory of the process.  A null pathname shall not be successfully
resolved.  A pathname that begins with two successive slashes may be
interpreted in an implementation-defined manner, although more than two
leading slashes shall be treated as a single slash."

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