Re: inconsistent pathnames

http://common-lisp.net/project/names-and-paths anyone?  (The hosting  
machine is currently down due to a move to a different location in  
Milan. it will be up next week)

Cheers

Marco




On Sep 6, 2007, at 10:09 AM, Walter C. Pelissero wrote:

> Raymond Toy (RT/EUS) writes:
>>>> I also now see there are a whole bunch of issues, like how should
>>>> "..a" be parsed?  Is it name = "..a", type = nil, or name = ".",  
>>>> type
>>>> "a", or something else?  My head hurts.
>>>
>>> I suppose anything goes as long as you are consistent.  After all  
>>> the
>>> concept of file type in the pathname is alien to the Unix  
>>> filesystem.
>>> Though, I can immagine, different behaviours from different Lisp
>>> implementations may cause portability issues.
>>
>> Converting strings to pathnames has never been portable.  If you want
>> portability, you need to use make-pathname directly.
>
> Well, there are situation where you can't use MAKE-PATHNAME yourself.
> DIRECTORY, for instance, will use it for you.  That BTW was the source
> of my problems.  Knowing in advance what goes in type and what goes in
> name, I believe, does simplify writing portable code.
>
>>>>     WP> that Unix allows things like "cat .", maybe SBCL's  
>>>> approach is the
>>>>
>>>> On Solaris, Mac OS X, and Linux:
>>>>
>>>> $ /bin/cat .
>>>> cat: input error on .: Is a directory
>>>
>>> Are you working on a NFS filesystem?  That's not the behaviour of a
>>> Posix open().
>>
>> Actually, on Solaris it was an NFS system.  But for Mac OS X, and  
>> Linux,
>> it was not.  But on Solaris cat /bin dumps out the directory.
>
> A friend confirmed that although Linux cat complains when fed with a
> directory, the behaviour of its open(2) is in line with Posix.  That
> is, it will happily open a directory.
>
> Funny enough, I'm running FreeBSD from which Mac OS X should descend.
>
> -- 
> walter pelissero
> http://www.pelissero.de
>

--
Marco Antoniotti, Associate Professor
DISCo, Università Milano Bicocca
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