Re: (expand-file-name "/..")

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <[email protected]> writes:

>  > The good news is that at least this is FSF compatible behavior.
>
> I think this is a killer argument for documenting the anomoly, not
> changing behavior.  Of course, I'm very conservative on this kind of
> thing.
>
> Is there a practical problem you experience, or does this
> inconsistency just bother you?

It is easy enough to work around, I guess. In the task at hand I am
traversing a filesystem tree towards root via something along the
lines of:

  (expand-file-name (concat dirname ".."))

Getting all the way to "/.." is a corner case situation that is
extremely unlikely to occur in practice, still needs to be dealt
with.

It was more my surprise than anything else that made me
investigate. Also bothering was the workaround suggested by Emacs'
docstring which simply isn't robust.

>  >   (expand-file-name "/.")
>  >   => "/"
>
> That's what I get already.

True. My mistake.

> If you want to pursue this, I think you need to ask on emacs-devel.

Not worth bothering. A docstring fix would be sufficient.

Regards
Marcus