RE: Another word for "path"?

[Bingham, Jay]

On  Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:37 PM David Masterson writes:

>>>>>> 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).
>
>> 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.

VMS did have such a concept, how I miss it.  A "symbol" could be defined that 
contained a series of directory specifications.  The symbol was not limited to 
name PATH so multiple search path symbols could be defined and did not require 
a $ preceding it.  It was very useful, it is too bad that Unix does not have a 
similar facility.

-_
J_)
C_)ingham
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