Monetizing the value of a directory hierarchy

Having recently become an Unicode (ab)user, in great part due to Kragen’s .XCompose, I took again the mission to convince people that resistance is futile, you will be assimilated into the multilingual world of UTF8…

…And given the recent thread in debian-devel regarding how a globbing or similar functionality should be implemented (specifically, given Giacomo’s message pointing out that our beloved «/» directory separator is subject to the locale rules)…

I cannot help but to send you to this old piece of MSDN beauty: When is a backslash not a backslash?

In short: If you are surprised because in East Asia they use the local currency to separate directories… Don’t be. Blame the 8 bits of extended, non-standard ASCII codepages.

Comments

Zack 2009-06-09 08:33:34

Giacomo’s wrong, though –

Giacomo’s wrong, though – not necessarily about POSIX itself, but there is no Unix implementation that will permit the byte 0x2F in a pathname component, no matter what the locale is; indeed, the user’s locale is totally unknown to the kernel, so how could it do otherwise?