Re: handling "/"

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 11:30:42PM +0000, Carles Pina i Estany wrote:
> I've seen a couple of patches about handling "/".
> 
> In Linux (I think that it's up to Linux, but maybe is libc?) things like
> ///bin///// are valid. Or things like /var/tmp//
> 
> Is this not everywhere? I've not verified if POSIX paths says this, but
> would avoid the things that has been patching and unpatching today.

POSIX says:

  Multiple successive <slash> characters are considered to be the same
  as one <slash>, except for the case of exactly two leading <slash>
  characters.

(Two leading <slash> characters are implementation-defined; I think this
is for compatibility with the way some systems handle network mounts.)

However, many people feel that multiple contiguous slashes are inelegant
anyway, and strive to avoid them.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden