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Date:      Wed, 20 Aug 1997 16:26:27 -0700 (MST)
From:      Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
To:        jlemon@americantv.com (Jonathan Lemon)
Cc:        jkh@time.cdrom.com, kudzu@dnai.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: su: kerberos: not in root's ACL.
Message-ID:  <199708202326.QAA21184@phaeton.artisoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <19970819222144.16313@right.PCS> from "Jonathan Lemon" at Aug 19, 97 10:21:44 pm

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> > However, what's unclear here is whether or not there is some
> > "historical" behavior in having a trailing : in one's path result in
> > an implicit inclusion of `.', something which is also a side-effect of
> > what happens here.
> 
> Well, it isn't just historical, but is a property of every single shell
> I know; a null directory component is taken as an implicit '.'.  This 
> isn't just a trailing ':', but could also be a PATH like "/bin::/usr/bin".
> 
> This behavior is also documented in the man page.  Was there something 
> else going on here that I missed?

Yes:

% ls -l /home/terry/morestuff
lrwxrwxrwx  1 terry  staff  8 Jun  9  1996 /home/terry/morestuff -> /b/terry
% ls -l /home/terry/morestuff/
total 7210
drwxrwxr-x   2 terry  wheel     512 Sep 30  1996 DOC
drwxrwxr-x   4 terry  staff     512 Jul 31 12:42 ELF
drwxrwxr-x   2 terry  wheel     512 Nov  4  1996 FDISK
drwxrwxr-x   2 terry  staff     512 Sep 24  1996 FS
-rw-------   1 terry  staff   23552 May 10  1996 I15_E820.DOC
drwxrwxr-x   3 terry  wheel     512 Nov  5  1996 LDAP
drwxrwxr-x   5 terry  wheel     512 Aug  8 14:52 MIME
drwxrwxr-x   2 terry  wheel     512 Jan 26  1997 PCTS
drwxrwxr-x   2 terry  wheel     512 Oct 10  1996 RLOCK
drwxrwxr-x   2 terry  wheel     512 Apr  5 16:33 SMB
-rw-------   1 terry  staff   11319 Dec  8  1995 SMP.cur
drwxrwxr-x   7 terry  wheel     512 Aug 27  1996 SYSINIT
drwxrwxr-x   2 terry  staff     512 Sep 24  1996 UNI
drwxr-xr-x   2 terry  wheel     512 Oct 18  1996 WIN95
drwxrwxr-x   2 terry  wheel     512 Jun 27  1996 dll
-rw-rw-r--   1 terry  wheel  371840 Jun 21  1996 draft-heizer-cifs-v1-spec-00.txt

...

The additional "." assumed for the "" component following the
trailing "/" allows override for "target of symbolic link" in
place of "symbolic link".  This is:

1)	On purpose
2)	A very, very good feature
3)	Handy as hell


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



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