Re: OT: shell prompt tip
On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, J.P. Larocque wrote:
>On an unrelated note, I'm *fairly* new to Linux (or UNIX in general), only
>having been using it for about a year. In the DOS command-interpreter 4DOS,
>I could refer to parent directories as . and .. as is the norm in DOS and UNIX.
>But I could also type, say, "cd ....", which would be equivalent of typing
>"cd ..\..\..\". It could be thought of as going up the directory tree, one dot
>per level, the first representing the CWD. Is there any practical way I could
>make bash expand multiple dots like it would wildcards, passing the full
>expanded form onto the program being called, without hacking up the source to
>bash?
One reason this would not scale well from DOS to Unix, is that
"..." "...." ".....", etc are in fact perfectly legal filenames under
Unix/Linux. In MS DOS, the "." is a special character used by the
FAT filesystem, and cannot be used in the filename, so "..." etc are
free to be interpreted by shells and commands such as 4DOS, and various
replacements for "CD"
One Debian package I have come across so far that actually does create
files called "..." is the Crypto Filesystem Daemon, cfsd.
Regards
Ahmed
My ICQ Number is:- 89224228
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