Jay DeKing wrote: > On Friday 04 July 2003 9:27 am, Frederic Crozat honored me with this > communique: >> >> Because it is the correct way to form an URL : >> >> http://foobar/foo/bar should grab file bar in foo directory >> >> http://foobar/foo/bar/ should grab index file in bar directory.. >> >> Many web servers do a redirection when first case doesn't apply and >> 'bar' directory exist.. But it is BAD :) > > The trailing "/" is especially important (in general) because if you run > "ls" on a directory name that is actually just a link to another > directory, you don't get the contents of that directory - just the name > of the link.
AFAIK this generally does not apply to web hosting, but AFAIK the trailing / is important in certain scenarios of virtual hosting (possibly in combination with url rewriting). I have come across sites that don't respond without the trailing /, and AFAIK they were virtual-hosted. > This little feature bites me all the time in Solaris (at > work) because I have a number of links set up this way to make it > easier for me to cd to my userware directories (I write a lot of > scripts, etc. that I want others to be able to access - but I don't > want other users to be able to have access to my /home subdirectories, > so I put them in a semi-public location and put my own links in > /home/usr). I am forever forgetting the trailing "/". However, it is > still easier for me to type ~/usr/<linkname>/ than to type something > like /data/mgc_arch/cust/etc/mgc_tk/en/userware/<dirname>. > $ man bash |col -b|grep -C4 CDPATH > Yes, in my opinion it is bad to leave off the trailing "/". > And sometimes it is bad to add it (depending what you are doing). rsync for one is very sensitive to the trailing /. But you shouldn't generalise this argument too far away from the original topic or URLs, since it gets very copmlex and off-topic ... Regards, Buchan
