Re: [boost] Re: [filesystem] Generic path grammar corner cases

From: Jonathan Wakely (cow_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-06-02 12:51:18

On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 10:37:14AM -0400, Beman Dawes wrote:

> 
> "David Daeschler" <daveregs_at_[hidden]> wrote in message 
> news:d7n1to$rr7$1_at_sea.gmane.org...
> > Since the slash or slashes in that case are extraneous, I would also say 
> > option 2 is the way to go.  Remove the trailing slash because it was 
> > probably not intended in the first place.
> 
> I don't believe removing a trailing slash is a good idea because that isn't 
> how POSIX or Windows treats a trailing slash, and  also because some apps 
> may depend on it to distinguish between a directory path and a file path.

e.g a trailing slash changes semantics when dealing with symlinks:

$ mkdir aaa
$ touch aaa/monkey
$ ln -s aaa bbb
$ ls -l bbb
lrwxrwxrwx  1 redi redi 3 Jun  2 18:40 bbb -> aaa
$ ls -l bbb/
-rw-rw-r--  1 redi redi 0 Jun  2 18:40 monkey

In answer to your first question, I think I prefer (2) too.

Regarding the escape sequence, do you want to play nicely with
null-terminated char strings?  If not, '\0' would be my choice, since
that and '/' are the only characters POSIX disallows in a filename.
But there are probably plenty of ways that would cause otherwise valid
programs to fail.

Then again, I'm not sure it's necessary to support slashes in filenames
at all.

jon