kpathsea problem

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Mon, 7 Jun 1999, Erik Frambach wrote:

> My experience is that DOS and
> DOS-alikes (Win3,Win9x,WinNT) will not stumble on double backslashes
> in paths, *unless* they appear right after the colon. So this will not work:
>   dir c:\\
> but
>   dir c:\winnt\\fonts
> will work. I guess this is just one of those features...

The reason for this is that leading double-backslash is interpreted by 
Windows 9X as a possible \\server\share UNC-like path name.  So these 
names usually work, but cause a long delay (while Windows tries to find 
such a server on the net), and some people lose patience...

Double slashes in any other place may or may not work; it all depends on 
the particular system call and the utility which you are using to 
interface with the system call (like shell or Explorer).  There's no 
consistent behavior here.  In contrast, Unix system calls generally 
collapse multiple slashes, so many Unix programs don't care.  (This is 
why the DJGPP library collapses slashes in the low-level function that 
passes all file names to the OS.)