[ On Monday, June 23, 2003 at 11:10:49 (+0100), Ben Harris wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Trailing '/' to mkdir(2) revisited
>
> Footnote for the bored:  The problem with POSIX-2001 is that the definition
> of pathname resolution (section 4.11) says that pathnames ending in '/' that
> contain non-'/' characters are resolved as if they had '.' appended.

Yes, IIRC, that's the bug in POSIX-2001.  Previously, and in all
historical real-world implementations, multiple slashes are collapsed to
one slash and a trailing slash on a pathnames is _ALWAYS_ ignored.  From
the kernel's point of view trailing slashes do not mark directories, or
anything else for that matter -- they are simply ignored.

(Yes, trailing slashes can indicate the required presense of a directory
of the given name from the user's point of view of an application's
command-line interface, such as with tools like 'cp', 'mv', 'rsync',
etc., but that doesn't mean that's the way the underlying system calls
should work.)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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