>> 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