[Python-Dev] Re: os.path.commonprefix breakage

[Greg Ewing]

M.-A. Lemburg:

> By dropping the trailing slash from the path
> you are removing important information from the path information.

No, you're not. A trailing slash on a Unix pathname doesn't
tell you anything about whether it refers to a directory.
Actually, it doesn't tell you anything at all. Slashes
simply delimit pathname components, nothing more.

A demonstration of this:

s454% cat > foo/
asdf
s454% cat foo/
asdf
s454% 

A few utilites display pathnames with trailing slashes in
order to indicate that they refer to directories, but that's
a special convention confined to those tools. It doesn't
apply in general.

The only sure way to find out whether a given pathname refers 
to a directory or not is to ask the filesystem. And if the 
object referred to doesn't exist, the question of whether it's 
a directory is meaningless.

Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	   | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a	  |
Christchurch, New Zealand	   | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc.  |
greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz	   +--------------------------------------+