Re: expand-file-name leaves "/../" in expansions at times

[Miles Bader]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
>> I always thought it was a rather clever idea.  It certainly messes up
>> assumptions some programs make, but I think the "/.." == "/" assumption
>> is generally rather rare in practice.  [Compare to the microsoftian "//"
>> superroot syntax, which messes up the far more common "//" == "/"
>> assumption, and just generally feels a lot more arbitrary.]
>
> The Microsoft // doesn't mess up anything because on Microsoft
> filesystems // != /.

My point was that lots of (unixoid) _apps_ assume // = /, and it's
rather common to "prettify" filenames by doing the equivalent of "sed
address@hidden//@/@" [*] -- which screws up filenames using the MS superroot.

The reason many unixoid apps do such prettification is that filenames
inadvertently containing "//" at the beginning are pretty common too,
e.g. when you have a Makefile that does "FOO_DIR = $(INSTALL_ROOT)/foo"
and INSTALL_ROOT is "/".

-Miles

-- 
A zen-buddhist walked into a pizza shop and
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