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Re: OT pondering (WAS: Re: Trailing Periods on File Names)


My guess:  DOS filenames are composed of two parts -- the main part and the
extension.  When parsing filenames, you look for the '.'.  Anything before the
'.' is the main part; anything after it is the extension.  Files ending with '.'
just don't have an extension.

Noel




jmerz42@earthlink.net on 2001.04.05 15:02:55

Please respond to jmerz42@earthlink.net

To:
cc:   cygwin@cygwin.com (bcc: Noel L Yap)
Subject:  OT pondering (WAS: Re: Trailing Periods on File Names)




Larry Hall (RFK Partners, Inc) wrote:

> At 02:38 PM 4/5/2001, Randall R Schulz wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I just discovered some odd behavior.
>>
>> Witness:
>>
>> % mkdir dir
>> % cd dir
>> % ls -l
>> total 0
>> % echo "I like Cygwin" >|File
>> % ls -l
>> total 0
>> -rw-r--r--   1 randall  None           15 Apr  5 11:31 File
>> %
>> % ls -l File.
>> -rw-r--r--   1 randall  None           15 Apr  5 11:31 File.
>> %
>
>
> <snip>
>
>
>
>> Curious, no? Perhaps this is a side-effect of the potential aliasing of
suffix-less names and the same name with a ".exe" suffix?
>
>
>
> No, this is Windows madness.  It ignores periods at the end of file names.
>

I agree with that, having seen this before, but I am curious... It seems that
such functionality did not get there by accident (I cannot think of a way to
ignore characters in a filename without some _extra_ coding), so it must have
been done for some purpose.  Yet I cannot for the life of me imagine what
benefit this produces, or what fault it would circumvent.  Anyone have ideas
as to this?






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