Tue, 02 Sep 2008

« The 90s #1 | MAIN | Tony Woodlief on homeschooling »

Careful with that slash, Eugene

Til today, I never realized there was a difference in emacs between a directory's filename and directory name:

A directory name is the name of a directory. A directory is actually a kind of file, so it has a file name, which is related to the directory name but not identical to it. (This is not quite the same as the usual Unix terminology.) These two different names for the same entity are related by a syntactic transformation. On GNU and Unix systems, this is simple: a directory name ends in a slash, whereas the directory's name as a file lacks that slash.

I suspect my lack of slashes after directory names is the root of my problem today in porting my work gnus setup to my home computer.

Update: here's what John and I were talking about in the comments:

A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.—Lord Peter Wimsey

Left column Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.