On 05/17/2010 09:17 AM, Filipus Klutiero wrote: >> Strip the last component and resulting trailing slashes; if the file >> name contains only one component, print '.'. >> >> But I welcome your ideas for a coherent sentence. >> > That sounds more correct and comprehensible. I don't know how many > corner cases there are and if they can all be covered in the help, but > there's also the no component case: > $ dirname '' > prints ".".
Yes, that's a corner case not covered by the above sentence, which we could fix with "if the file name contains less than two components, print '.'". > $ dirname / > prints "/". I tend to classify the all-slash corner case as being one component, not zero components. You can view it as the root directory being contained in (well, reachable from) the root directory, as evidenced by '/../' resolving to '/'. But that doesn't work as well with the '<2 components' wording above, so I'm feeling more comfortable with leaving the corner-cases undocumented in the terse --help output, by using your view that '/' has no components rather than 1, and anyone worried about the two corner cases of '' and '/' can read the info page. -- Eric Blake [email protected] +1-801-349-2682 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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