On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 09:45:15AM -0800, Roland McGrath wrote: > the empty string has never been a valid relative pathname. Hmm. I definitely recall otherwise. The old Unix definition is that the empty string stands for "." so that 'ls ""' means the same as 'ls .' and 'ls /tmp/""' the same as 'ls /tmp/.'. Let me try. On a recent Linux system: % ls -l "" ls: cannot access : No such file or directory On an old Unix system: # ls -l "" drwxr-xr-x 2 bin 1040 Jan 1 1970 bin drwxr-xr-x 2 bin 352 Jan 1 1970 dev drwxr-xr-x 2 bin 304 Aug 20 12:39 etc ... Andries -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html