On Feb 9, 2006, at 1:43 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:
At 9:56 PM -0600 2/8/06, Ken Williams wrote:
Hi Steven,
On VMS is 'USER:[SLEMBARK.FINDBIN-LIBS-1_20]' an absolute path, i.e.
is the SLEMBARK directory understood to be at the root of the USER
volume?
Yes. You would not see the volume name if it weren't an absolute path.
So on VMS there's no equivalent of the Windows pathname "C:Foo\Bar",
which means "the Foo\Bar directory relative to whatever the C drive's
current working directory is"?
If so, probably splitpath() is actually returning the wrong result.
On other platforms it returns an initial empty string to indicate an
absolute path (it's kind of an historical accident, but now that's
just its semantics):
The documentation states that the first item returned is the volume,
and "On systems with no concept of volume, returns '' for volume." I
would take this to mean that the volume would be an empty string on,
for example, unix, regardless of whether the path is relative or
absolute. On VMS, it returns the empty string for the volume when
there is no volume in the input parameter, i.e., the path is relative.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something, but I can't see how an empty
volume name could ever indicate an absolute path.
Ack, sorry, I meant to say splitdir(), not splitpath().
-Ken
