Re: Hurd and Unix/Linux and Plan9 features

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> "PT" == Pierre THIERRY <nowhere.man@levallois.eu.org> writes:

 >> Does this mean that something like "cd .." or "ls .." will no work
 >> in ngHurd?

 PT> It would just work in the way current systems work: it's not the FS
 PT> but the application that decides what .. is.

 PT> Try this on any available Unix with:

 > ~$ mkdir -p a/b c/d
 > ~$ cd c/d
 > ~/c/d$ ln -s ../../a/b e
 > ~/c/d$ cd e
 > ~/c/d/e$ cd ..
 > ~c/d$

 PT> According to .. in FS, you should now be in a/b. But currently,
 PT> most shells parse .. lexically.

        Yes, shells oftenly do that.  Note, however, that almost every
        other program isn't so smart:

$ mkdir -p a/b c/d
$ cd c/d
c/d $ ln -s ../../a/b e
c/d $ cd e
c/d/e $ ls ../
b
c/d/e $ 

        Would `ls' parse `..' by itself, `e' would have been shown
        instead.

        And again, I'm not about to /deny/ such ``lexical''
        interpretation of `..', but it's not clear to me, which benefits
        it would bring (or, which things it would break?)