[1198] in bugtraq
Re: Sendmail fixkit
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (der Mouse)
Tue Mar 7 15:01:37 1995
Date: Tue, 7 Mar 1995 13:11:33 -0500
From: der Mouse <mouse@Collatz.McRCIM.McGill.EDU>
To: bugtraq@fc.net
>> On old versions of UNIX "" was the same as ".".
> It still is, at least, under SunOS and BSD/OS.
>> On newer versions the extra /'s are just skipped over.
> They always were, at least, since Edition 5.
This is a little confusing to me. When you say that "" is/was the same
as ".", do you mean as a pathname component, or as an entire pathname?
If the former, that seems inconsistent with saying that extra slashes
are "just skipped over", because foo/./bar theoretically involves
looking up . in foo, while just skipping the extra slash in foo//bar is
not the same.
How can there be any difference? I _think_ looking up . is a
nontrivial operation for an NFS filesystem; others, with unusual lookup
semantics, may also draw a distinction.
der Mouse
mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu
