Re: Another word for "path"?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <un0lthvyy.fsf@synopsys.com>,
David Masterson  <dmaster@synopsys.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Barry Margolin writes:
>
>> In article <84u1g2cu7k.fsf@lucy.is.informatik.uni-duisburg.de>,
>> Kai Großjohann <kai.grossjohann@uni-duisburg.de> wrote:
>>> Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> writes:
>
>>>> Whatever... Where have you seen 'path' defined this way?
>
>>> GNU coding standards.  Since Tramp is a GNU program (or part of it,
>>> anyway), it's a good idea to adhere to this document :-)
>
>> Unix has always referred to something like /foo/bar/baz as a
>> pathname.
>
>I thought it always referred to as "filename".  I think the term
>"pathname" became more prevalent after $PATH came into being (so it
>does go back a *long* way).

"filename" is often used to refer to the individual components of a
pathname, e.g. "foo", "bar", and "baz" are filenames.

The term "pathname" goes way back to the 60's -- it was used by Multics
designers.

>> I've always understood a list of directories like in $PATH to be
>> called a "search path", to distinguish it from a "file path".
>
>Didn't VMS have a "file path" type concept that was more akin to $PATH
>such that you could say "$PATH:file" and it would search the PATH for
>a "file"?  Maybe it was also a concept in TOPS-20/10, but that's too
>far back for me to remember clearly.

I think they called them "logical devices", or something like that, because
you used them in a pathname in place of a disk device.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@genuity.net
Genuity, Woburn, MA
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