access()

[Peter da Silva]

In article <1040 at auspex.UUCP>, guy at auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) writes:
>  >So someone should tell the people doing HDB uucp to stop converting:
>  >	//node/path/file
>  >into:
>  >	/node/path/file
>  >so we could access remote nodes on our net from our new System V box.

OK. Our new system V box is just... System V. The name on the front is
Unisys, but it's really an Arix box. The CPU is a 68020.

Our old boxes are Xenix 286 3.5, based on System III. They are running a
network called "OpenNET" that uses the syntax:

	//node/path/file

to access files on another node. OK. We're a freindly bunch. We let the
System V box access the whole net. Or we try to.

	sysv% uucp xenix1!//xenix2/usr/fred/project/code.plm code.plm

Sounds good. Except BNU decides that "//" is a typo, and changes it to "/".
Then xenix1 sees "/xenix2/..." and can't find the file.

I can't think of a good reason for it to perform this translation. Can
you?

> The fact that HDB performs that transformation really says nothing other
> than that the people who wrote the code to do that thought it was OK to
> do so; since they were, I think, all running on systems with
> more-or-less AT&T-derived file system handling code (or code written to
> behave pretty much like said code), they probably either didn't think
> about systems where '//' means something special or didn't care about
> them. 

Ah, but AT&T systems have no problem with "//" or "///" or "/////", so there
should be no advantage to doing this.

You want to know what my point is... it's simply this: if it's not broken,
why did they decide to fix it? It causes problems in the feild. They should
take the code out again.
-- 
Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.
Work: uunet.uu.net!ficc!peter, peter at ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180.   `-_-'
Home: bigtex!texbell!sugar!peter, peter at sugar.uu.net.                 'U`
People have opinions. Companies have policy. And typos are my own business.