Messages in this thread | | | From | (H. Peter Anvin) | Subject | Re: Getting IOCTL's into VFS File System Drivers | Date | 14 Nov 1999 18:17:48 GMT |
| |
Followup to: <7Ss55F9mw-B@khms.westfalen.de> By author: kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel > > > Obviously modeled after v7, but _what_ a mess had they slapped onto > > the upper half for CP/M emulation... Scary. It almost looked like a small > > subset of UNIX placed on a box with rather shitty IO and buried under the > > heaploads of CP/M compatibility crap. They might start with CP/M clone, > > but 3.x internals looked rather like a castrated and mutilated Xenix. > > That was true since 2.x, actually, and what they mutilated was Xenix. It > was officially called "Xenix compatibility". > > There is a persistent rumour that the "\" thing was because one of the > developers simply got things wrong by accident. >
And it is also obviously bull. DOS 1.x (which was a pure CP/M clone) used / as the option character, so for compatibility they couldn't use it for paths... *especially* since DOS made it legal to type the option immediately adjacent to a pathname (COPY FOO BAR/V). DOS 2.x actually had an option to use - as the option character, which made it possible to use / as a pathname separator. DOS 2.x also had a kernel option to only recognize devices if the path was prepended with \DEV\ (or /DEV/), instead of polluting the namespace of every single directory. I believe OS/2 actually used this.
To this day, every version of DOS 2.0 and later allows you to use / as the pathname separator in system calls -- but most utilities will see it as an option marker.)
-hpa -- <hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private! "Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |