From maintainers-request at octave dot org Wed Dec 14 17:31:51 2005
Subject: Re: wav error
From: Russell Standish <r dot standish at unsw dot edu dot au>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Cc: Bill Denney <denney at seas dot upenn dot edu>,         Stefan van der Walt <stefan@sun.ac.za>, maintainers@octave.org
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 10:30:26 +1100


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I suppose the problem is that ':' is a perfectly legitimate posix
filename character - interpreting it as magical may well break other progra=
ms.

For instance - suppose you had a machine called "c", and accidently
typed:

   cp  foo.tar.gz c:

instead of scp foo.tar.gz c:. This will create a file with the name
"c:foo.tar.gz" - mind you if c: was interpreted consistently as
referring to a drive letter, then the results would perhaps not be too
serious. In fact, the correct scp command will fail to work as
intended. But then not being able to name your machines with single
letters is perhaps not too much funtionality to give away.

Cheers

PS did you realise that it is impossible to create any file with the
name aux, aux.*, prn, prn.* etc on a Windows file system. This is a
far more insidious magical character sequence than the simple case of
leading <letter>: I had a file called aux.cc in my software
distribution that caused no end of grief when I tried to port it to Cygwin!



On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 05:52:26PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 14-Dec-2005, Bill Denney wrote:
>=20
> | Something just occurred to me.  As far as I know, the c: drive is alway=
s=20
> | put into /cygdrive/c/ in cygwin.  Would it be feasible to always transl=
ate=20
> | "<alpha>:\" at the beginning of a filename into "/cygdrive/<alpha>/"?=
=20
> | This would be a bit of a hack, but it would help many windows users out.
>=20
> I don't think Octave (and every application) should have to deal with
> details like this.  If you want to have this kind of magic translation
> happen, then isn't the place for that the Cygwin code that handles
> files?  I suspect there is a reason that they have not already done
> this.
>=20
> jwe

--=20
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----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A/Prof Russell Standish                  Phone 8308 3119 (mobile)
Mathematics                         	       0425 253119 (")
UNSW SYDNEY 2052         	         R dot Standish at unsw dot edu dot au            =20
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