Re: cocoa file paths, / or :
Re: cocoa file paths, / or :
- Subject: Re: cocoa file paths, / or :
- From: Kurt Revis <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2002 11:19:51 -0800
P.S. I understand that Darwin sees the "/", but isn't Darwin being lied
to? I seem to recall that HFS uses ":" as its file delimiter. I
recall (and I may be mistaken), that the delimiter is ":", Darwin is
fooled into thinking it's "/", and then the user is supposed to be
presented with ":" again.
It's my understanding that there is no "native" path separator in the
file system. HFS/HFS+ doesn't actually store full paths, with ':' or '/'
in them, anywhere. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong here.) However,
HFS/HFS+ does disallow the ':' character in filenames. There are some
File Manager calls in the old Mac OS (now in Carbon) which let the
programmer work with full paths, delimited by ':', but those aren't
really "part of the filesystem" (although this may be splitting hairs).
I can't find the original email right now, but I recall reading that
there are multiple places where ';' gets changed to '/', and vice
versa. It's not nearly as elegant as one might expect, but it works.
You might also see this paper:
http://www.mit.edu/people/wsanchez/papers/USENIX_2000/
which details the different layers a little.
As far as what to show the user: Currently even Apple's programs do it
both ways. Obviously the Finder uses colons, but in the System
Preferences (the Internet icon, "Web" tab) paths are shown with
slashes. Yes, this is sort of lame. I don't really know if there is a
push to reconcile it or not. You might ask on the Apple-HI-Developers
mailing list (or check its archives), where I have no doubt that lots of
blood has been spilled over this issue.
How's that for definitive?
--
Kurt Revis
email@hidden
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