From: "John M. Aldrich" Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: File utils are crap? Date: Sun, 22 Dec 1996 20:59:47 -0800 Organization: Two pounds of chaos and a pinch of salt Lines: 23 Message-ID: <32BE11B3.5417@cs.com> References: Reply-To: fighteer AT cs DOT com NNTP-Posting-Host: ppp104.cs.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit CC: Ian Romanick To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > To avoid such a costly > test, DJGPP just strips away the "/dev/" part and lets DOS decide if the > rest is a known file. This makes "ls -l /dev/tty" and "ls -l /dev/clock$" > work. Unfortunately, it also has a nasty side-effect if you really have a > directory called "/dev". End of story. Would it be possible to put a switch in the DJGPP startup code that turns off this implicit device handling? That way a program ported from Unix would work properly, but a program written for DOS alone could turn off the handling and be able to use "/dev" like it expects to. Unfortunately, to use this feature with ported programs, you would still have to convert all the /dev/* references to the DOS ones, which eliminates the benefit of the library conversion in the first place. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- | John M. Aldrich, aka Fighteer I | fighteer AT cs DOT com | | * Proud user of DJGPP! * | http://www.cs.com/fighteer | | ObJoke: If Bill Gates were a robber, not only would he | | shoot you, but he'd send you a bill for the bullets. | ---------------------------------------------------------------------