From dmurdoch at pair.com  Mon Nov 24 13:05:35 2003
From: dmurdoch at pair.com (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Mon Nov 24 13:04:34 2003
Subject: [Rd] Question about Unix file paths
Message-ID: <ils3svsfa9rt1725lb9mt42d0gc63pq8ba@4ax.com>

Gabor Grothendieck pointed out a bug to me in list.files(...,
full.name=TRUE), that essentially comes down to the fact that in
Windows it's not always valid to add a path separator (slash or
backslash) between a path specifier and a filename.  For example,

c:foo

is different from

c:\foo

and there are other examples.

I'm going to fix this, but I'm wondering whether the fix is needed
just for Windows, or for Unix too.  Specifically:

In Unix-like systems, is it *always* safe to add a slash between a
pathname and a filename?

The only examples I can think of that might go wrong are things like

//foo

/tmp//foo

Are these the same as

/foo

and

/tmp/foo?  Are there any examples where an extra slash causes trouble?

Duncan Murdoch


[Rd] Question about Unix file paths
Duncan Murdoch