Re: Stuff 7/9
Re: Stuff 7/9
- Subject: Re: Stuff 7/9
- From: Matt Deatherage <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2005 21:09:54 -0500
On 9/7/05 at 5:17 PM, Barry Wainwright <email@hidden> wrote:
> This has got to be a bug...
>
> POSIX path of "HD:Users:BNW:stuff 7/9"
> -- "/HD/Users/BNW/stuff 7:9"
In fact, this is very much not a bug, though I cannot point you to a reference that describes why.
Informally: If a pathname starts with a "/", it is presumed to be a POSIX path inside the file system level of Mac OS X. This is a problem on HFS-family file systems, because any of the directories could have "/" as part of the directory or file name. You could name your user folder "and/or" if you really wanted to annoy both the OS and grammarians.
Therefore, when constructing a POSIX path on a HFS-family disk, the system changes "/" to ":", because ":" is the one character that *can't* be in an HFS-family name. When the system is passed a file name that has a colon in it, it knows that it's really supposed to be a slash.
It works the other way around on UFS disks - if you have a file named "10:00PM" in your user folder on a UFS startup disk, AppleScript (and the underlying Mac OS) return its HFS-style path as "HD:Users:BNW:10/00PM".
In short, if you request a full pathname that can't be legally constructed in the style you want because that style's separator character is in one of the path components, Mac OS X replaces that character in the pathname with the other separator character. Colons change to slashes in POSIX paths, and slashes change to colons in HFS-style paths.
It is documented *somewhere*, but I don't know where.
--
Matt Deatherage <email@hidden>
GCSF, Incorporated <http://www.macjournals.com>
Fortunately, I'm a big fan of eggplant.
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| | >Stuff 7/9 (From: Barry Wainwright <email@hidden>) |