[Gllug] Filesystem root directory oddity

[Richard Jones]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 08:35:11PM +0000, Richard Huxton wrote:
> It's something to do with a leading doubled slash:
> $ cd //var//log//; pwd
> //var/log

I recall that the leading double slash is special in POSIX, and in
fact Wikipedia points to this in the POSIX standard:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap04.html#tag_04_11

  "A pathname that begins with two successive slashes may be interpreted
  in an implementation-defined manner, although more than two leading
  slashes shall be treated as a single slash."

On some very old Apollo machines I used to use, //nodename/path
referred to a file on another machine, a kind of poor man's NFS.

Whether this has anything to do with the current discussion is left as
an exercise to members of GLLUG!

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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