At 2:00 PM -0800 3/26/05, Michael G Schwern wrote: >On Sat, Mar 26, 2005 at 09:35:10AM -0600, Craig A. Berry wrote: >> 2.) Use '_author' instead of '.author' when on VMS since a dot in a >> directory name is usually invalid and always awkward. > >Really? I've yet to see a problem with .foo style on VMS. Where does it >go wrong? > >If it is a bad thing on VMS, MI should use _foo everywhere rather than >create Yet Another VMS Exception.
The problem is it does a C<-d '.author'>, expecting the dot to be part of the directory name, not just a directory separator. So in VMS syntax, that's C<[..author]>, which is invalid on ODS-2 volumes or with traditional parsing in effect: $ create/directory [..author] %CREATE-E-DIRNOTCRE, [..AUTHOR] directory file not created -RMS-F-SYN, file specification syntax error On an ODS-5 volume on VMS 7.2 or later with extended parsing enabled, you can force a dot into a directory name by escaping it with a caret: $ create/directory [.^.author] $ directory ^.author.dir Directory DISK1:[perlStuff] ^.author.DIR;1 Total of 1 file. $ perl -e "print -d '^.author';" 1 But then you have to stick the caret in whenever you refer to it in order to make clear the dot is not a directory separator, and neither the File::Spec nor the VMS::Filespec functions handle the carets properly (yet). So that's the long-winded version of "usually invalid and always awkward". As far as using an underscore on all platforms (or getting rid of non-word characters entirely and just having C<author>), that'd be fine by me, but wouldn't it break things for anybody who's already got a .author directory? -- ________________________________________ Craig A. Berry mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] "... getting out of a sonnet is much more difficult than getting in." Brad Leithauser
