Miles Bader skrev:
Chong Yidong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
On the other hand, I just checked, and this behavior seems to have
been around since at least Emacs 20. Glancing through the source
code, this behavior seems to be deliberate---something to do with the
"superroot directory". Maybe someone on this list can elucidate?
I don't know anything about the Emacs code, but CMU CS had a networked
filesystem (the mach/spice project vaxes) which had the concept of a
super-root above /, accessed via "/..". E.g. to access file "/x/y" on
machine "blargh", you'd use "/../blargh/x/y" (IIRC, "/.." was a real
directory so you could do "cd /..", "ls /.." to see all machines, etc)..
I always thought it was a rather clever idea. It certainly messes up
assumptions some programs make, but I think the "/.." == "/" assumption
is generally rather rare in practice. [Compare to the microsoftian "//"
superroot syntax, which messes up the far more common "//" == "/"
assumption, and just generally feels a lot more arbitrary.]
Apollo also had // as superroot if my memory is correct. You could do
% ls //
to see all machines there as well. I don't know if this predates Microsofts
usage, but I suspect it does, this was late 80:s, early 90:s.
Jan D.
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