On 07/12/16 00:10, Brandon Williams wrote: > On 12/06, Junio C Hamano wrote: >> POSIX cares about treating "//" at the very beginning of the path >> specially. Is that supposed to be handled here, or by a lot higher >> level up in the callchain? > > What exactly does "//" mean in this context? (I'm just naive in this > area) This refers to a UNC path (ie Universal Naming Convention) which is used to refer to servers, printers and other 'network resources'. Although this started (many moons ago) in unix, it isn't used too much outside of windows networks! (where it is usually denoted by \\servername\path). You can see the relics of unix UNC paths if you look at the wording for basename() in the POSIX standard. Note the special treatment of the path which 'is exactly "//"', see http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/basename.html ATB, Ramsay Jones