DOS/Windows and slashes (was Re: Windows XP Pro and Possible filePro Bug)

[Bill Vermillion]

On Sun, Dec 05 01:48 , Fairlight gie sprachen "Vyizdur zomen 
emororz izaziz zander izorziz", and continued with: 

> Four score and seven years--eh, screw that!
> At about Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 12:54:19AM -0500,
> Bill Vermillion blabbed on about:

> > I always thought the  --  instead of the  -  that did us so well
> > for years was excessive - but then the options started getting
> > excessive in themselves.

> Google the man page for AFIO once. I think the first entry in
> the BUGS section is, "Too many command line options."

That's the the only one :-)_

> > My finger slipped off the 'v' key onto the adjacent 'c' key and
> > I type   ci <filename> when I wanted to type  vi <filename>.
> > But that's how we learn isn't it?  Have you ever done that one?

> Yeah, I've buggered something into CVS that way. Funnily, I was
> trying to type CVS just now and -three- times in a row typed
> VCS instead before I could force it to go right. :)

> I hate being at an odd angle and hitting caps lock instead of
> tab or shift while I'm in vi as well. Boy, can -that- suck. I
> type under a blanket sometimes so it's not like I -always- have
> the lights to look at.

Lights?  We don't need no steenkin' lights. [Original longer and
usutable for print in the original but popularized in Treasure Of
Sierra Madre. I checked and see about 30 TV shows that used that]

But my keboard is a noisy but great touch IBM - short keyboard - no
nummeric keypad and no lights at all.

> > Or things which come in from a Mac world where a / is permitted
> > in a file name.  I have enough problems with <spaces> when things
> > get moved cross-platform.

> I just tried escaping one in *nix and no joy.  (touch bli\/p)  You can
> escape damned near everything else, including control characters.

The only two characters you can not have in a Unix file name
are a 'slash' and a null '0x0'.  It's best to avoid anything but
printable unless you want to obfuscate things.

I remember playing around making a directory that either
dot-dot-uparrow, or uparrow-dot-dot. You had to be noticing with
a long listing that the .. below the . was slightly brighter :-)

> Not slashes. Okay, now that OS/X is stacked on top of BSD
> 4.2 or 4.3 (I've heard conflicting stories...but the most
> consistent one is that it's just like NeXTStep--BSD 4.2 on top
> of the Mach microkernel), how do they honour legacy Mac OS/n<=9
> filenames if you can't escape that character even in modern
> unixen? I can't even force perl to take it on *nix, so it's not
> a shell thing...it's the OS.

When I said shell thing, if you are using the orignal csh
you had to escape the !, but you didn't have to do this with
the standard sh.   Most noticeable when typing bang paths
in uucp transmissions.

OS/X still has the Mach kernel [I think 'micro' is an oxymoron when
related to kernels today]..  The concept goes back to the day
when a computer with 16MB was large - but in some ways loading
modules - except for things not always used - seems inefficient
today.    To quote a well known person on the OS/X microkernel
"Frankly, I think it's a piece of crap" - L.Torvalds -
Cnet, 04/06/2001.  

I remember when the people at CMU announced at the 1986 Technical
Usenix conference that they were developing a microkernel as the
current designs were too big and too slow.  At that annoucment they
succeed in making a kernel only about 30% larger and half as fast
as the current BSD. [Or was it 50% larger and 1/3 slower?]

But the last time I looked OS/X was a lot of 4.8.  The Panther
is supposed to have a lot of FreeBSD 5 in it.  5.3 is finally an
official release so it's finally about ready for production, 
and FreeBSD 6 is now CURRENT.   There will also be one more
4 Release  - with 4.11 in the next month or so - which may be the
final 4.x.  

Jordan Hubbard is pretty much directing that part and he was the
person who got FreeBSD going after the hiatus during the 
ATT vs Regents suit.

> And why do you have trouble with spaces?  Just put quotes around it if
> typing longhand, or use tab completion in your shell and let it escape
> itself with \'s.  I do it all the time--multiple times a day--when
> accessing files between both OSes.

I have problems when files get loaded with spaces in them when
they were transported from a Mac environment - no matter what the
vinated, and then only find this out later.

I don't personally have a problem with them but now and then the
system gets surpised with those, or with a Mac file with /' in
it being loaded in, such as making a copy of the files.  I
occaisionally had to help out on OS/X person whose Unix skills
were a bit on the light side.

Bill


-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com