*BSD News Article 12958


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From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: A challenge to all true kernel hackers - conditional symlinks.
Message-ID: <1993Mar17.203045.5353@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu
Organization: Weber State University  (Ogden, UT)
References: <C3qzvC.2ps@bcstec.ca.boeing.com> <1993Mar17.000717.12690@fcom.cc.utah.edu> <1993Mar17.022003.12845@peavax.mlo.dec.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 93 20:30:45 GMT
Lines: 38

In article <1993Mar17.022003.12845@peavax.mlo.dec.com> paik@mlo.dec.com (Samuel S. Paik) writes:
>In article <1993Mar17.000717.12690@fcom.cc.utah.edu> terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
>>The other fact, that the name space is only polluted for names beginning
>>with "$(" means that collisoin is unlikely anyway, so the pollution is
>>not disenfranchising "$", "(", and ")" as filename characters, but is
>>instead diasallowing "$(" file names only.
>
>Why would you want to restrict variables to only start at the
>beginning of a file name, besides reducing name space pollution?
>
>I'm virtually positive I had things like
>
>  /usr/local/bin --> /usr/local/bin.$(ARCH)
>
>back when I was on Domain.  (Apollo had two CPU architectures, the
>m68k and PRISM).  Then again, you can just as easily have
>
>  /usr/local/bin --> /usr/local/$(ARCH)/bin
>
>as well (and in fact, nowadays I do this in my PATH variable...)

While the second would definitely be preferred, in my opinion, I think
maybe `diasallowing "$(" file names` is too ambiguous.  What I meant
was `diasallowing "$(" in file names`.  I can see how it could have
been taken to mean "at the start of" instead of "in".


					Terry Lambert
					terry@icarus.weber.edu
					terry_lambert@novell.com
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
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