From: lhall AT rfk DOT com (Larry Hall) Subject: Re: Mounts and relative pathnames 11 Mar 1998 04:14:10 -0800 Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980310104531.009b8e40.cygnus.gnu-win32@pop.ma.ultranet.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: Kenneth Chiu , gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com At 11:58 AM 3/9/98 -0500, Kenneth Chiu wrote: >I seem to have a problem with 'ls' and relative pathnames. I have >searched the FAQ and the mailing list archives, but haven't found >anything. Suppose I do the following sequence: > > mount N:/root / > mount N:/dir1 /usr > cd / > ls usr > >I would expect to see the contents of N:/dir1, but instead I see >nothing. If I type 'ls /usr', I see what I expect, so I think I'm >executing the correct 'ls'. If I type 'cd usr', and then 'ls', I >also see what I expect. Here is what my mount table actually looks >like: > >Device Directory Type Flags >N:\Cygnus\B19\H-i386-cygwin32 /usr native text!=binary >N:\tmp /tmp native text!=binary >\\.\tape1: /dev/st1 native text!=binary >\\.\tape0: /dev/st0 native text!=binary >\\.\b: /dev/fd1 native text!=binary >\\.\a: /dev/fd0 native text!=binary >N:\root / native text!=binary > To be sure, the semantics of mount are not quite the same as they are on UNIX systems but keep in mind what is necessary to mount on UNIX systems! There you have to create a directory to mount to (in this case 'usr') before the mount would succeed. Now, granted, if you follow this procedure, its likely not going to work quite as you expect either. Welcome to beta software. mount has its problems. I find that creating a symbolic link solves this particular problem (OK, its a work-around) although there are still a few "uglies" that occur for mount that symbolic links won't resolve. To be honest, it looks to me like symbolic links afford all the high-level functionality that mounting is supposed to provide (except for binary/text file support) with less side effects. Check it out and see if you don't agree. Larry Hall lhall AT rfk DOT com RFK Partners, Inc. (781) 239-1053 8 Grove Street (781) 239-1655 - FAX Wellesley, MA 02181 http://www.rfk.com - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".