Re: Sendmail fixkit

[mouse () Collatz McRCIM McGill EDU (der Mouse)]

> > On old versions of UNIX "" was the same as ".".
> It still is, at least, under SunOS and BSD/OS.
> > On newer versions the extra /'s are just skipped over.
> They always were, at least, since Edition 5.

This is a little confusing to me.  When you say that "" is/was the same
as ".", do you mean as a pathname component, or as an entire pathname?
If the former, that seems inconsistent with saying that extra slashes
are "just skipped over", because foo/./bar theoretically involves
looking up . in foo, while just skipping the extra slash in foo//bar is
not the same.

How can there be any difference?  I _think_ looking up . is a
nontrivial operation for an NFS filesystem; others, with unusual lookup
semantics, may also draw a distinction.

                                        der Mouse

                            mouse () collatz mcrcim mcgill edu