On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 1:11 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > All character strings, including > | filenames, are treated by the kernel in such a way that THEY > | APPEAR TO IT ONLY AS STRINGS OF BYTES.
Yep, the real issue here is file systems, not the kernel. But yes, this is one of the very few places where the kernel deals with a string - and because of the hairiness of having to handle myriad file systems in a single path (imagine multiple levels of remote mounts - I've had a case where I mount via sshfs a tree that includes a Samba mount point, and you can go a lot deeper than that), the only thing it can do is pass the bytes on unchanged. Which means, in reality, the kernel doesn't actually do *anything* with the string, it just passes it right along to the file system. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
