Sami Kerola wrote: > Secondly,pardon my ignorance, I thought '/' and '//' or how ever many > slashes are the same root. Is this some non-obvious portability > gotcha? A link to education material would be great.
Correct. Anywhere except in the leading position the number of '/' characters is not significant. In the leading position if there are exactly two leading slash characters "//" then it is an implementation defined behavior. It may specify a network path. This behavior is a legacy system behavior. In the old days Apollo Computer produced the Aegis Domain/OS system. On that system paths were "//hostname/path/on/that/system". Therefore use of "//something" was not portable and could be indicating a networked path. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS As a pre-existing condition this was standardized by POSIX to allow either behavior. Because both behaviors were in common use. See the Pathname Resolution section where it describes this in some detail. http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/xrat/V4_xbd_chap04.html Cygwin needed a similar construct. Because the above was already standardized it was also available in Cygwin. Therefore Cygwin also uses this syntax too. Bob
