Re: Directory and file names

[ai26]

In a message of Mon, 15 Mar 2004 18:20:40 -0500 (EST)
Received on Tue, 16 Mar 2004 00:25:57 +0100

Larry Jones wrote to (Kyle Adams)

>Kyle Adams writes:
>>
>> Is there any way to allow directories and files that occupy the same
>> space (ie, the same parent directory) to have the same name?
>
>As you probably suspected, the answer is "no".  At the very least it
>would require a filesystem that had separate namespaces for files and
>directories and such filesystems are exceedingly rare.  

Well, just for fun: VMS almost does it.  Directories are always called
FOO.DIR;1 but nothing stops you from having a regular file FOO.DIR;2 at
the same time.  Heck, you can even have a FOO.DIR;1 which isn't a
directory.  But then you'll have trouble to create a subdir [.FOO] .

Since directories are accessed like [.FOO]SOME.FILE you can have a file
FOO. in the current directory at the same time.  That's pretty close to
having separate name spaces for files and directories.

>There's more
>than a fair chance that successfully using such a filesystem would also
>require changes to the CVS code, too.
>

Yep, seems the VMS cvs client can't handle that:

A400> dir cvs

Directory SYS$USER7:[SUPAS059.PDP10.LINFIT.REAL_LINFIT]

CVS.;1              CVS.DIR;1

Total of 2 files.
A400> dir [.cvs]

Directory SYS$USER7:[SUPAS059.PDP10.LINFIT.REAL_LINFIT.CVS]

ENTRIES.;9          REPOSITORY.;1       ROOT.;6

Total of 3 files.

A400> cvs add cvs
cvs add: cannot add special file `cvs'; skipping

But we can cheat:

A400> cvs add cvs.
cvs add: warning: directory cvs specified in argument
cvs add: but CVS uses CVS for its own purposes; skipping cvs directory
cvs server: cannot add special file `cvs'; skipping

Well, not really.


Michael