Re: substitute-in-file-name and "$"

[Kai Großjohann]

Luc Teirlinck <address@hidden> writes:

> What if somebody has an environment variable FOO expanding to bar and
> another file named $FOO?  Several operating systems, including GNU and
> Unix, allow people to essentially use any file names of their
> choosing, no matter how perverse.  Programs have to be able to handle
> that, even though that might make life complicated.

IMHO, the best approach is to have substitute-in-file-name return
"$$" for dollar signs in file names and to have all file primitives
grok this notation.

However, it suffers from being backward-incompatible.

Maybe the primitives could grok single dollar signs, too, then the
incompatibility would be restricted to file names with two adjacent
dollar signs.  Let's hope these are not too common.
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