[linux-cifs-client] Re: [PATCH] CIFS: convert all delimiters in prefix path to match unix extensions

Jeff Layton jlayton at redhat.com
Mon Feb 25 18:41:04 GMT 2008


On Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:19:43 -0600
"Steve French" <smfrench at gmail.com> wrote:

> Accepting either //server/share or \\server\share is fine with me -
> beyond that all is left alone in userspace (although I don't mind
> allowing the slash before the dir name to be either way if you think
> that that would help \\server\share\<dir>  )
> 

Is '\' a legit character in a share name? If so then we can't do that...

I suppose there's no harm in allowing (and autoconverting) '\' to
'/' in places where we *know* that the thing is a delimiter and not
something else. As best I can tell that includes the two characters
before the servername and the character just after it. Maybe the
character after the sharename too if '\' is not a legit character in a
sharename.

The main danger as I see it is confusion on the part of users. If we
autoconvert just those characters then a mount like this may not work:

\\server\share\foo\bar\baz

...is the share called "share" here or is it "share\foo\bar\baz"?

Presuming it's share, is the path really "/foo/bar/baz" or
"/foo\bar\baz" (1 path component)? This seems very unintuitive for the
average user.

If we take a harder line on enforcing '/' as a delimiter then some
people's mounts will break, but it does make things more clear. Adding
a good description of this issue to the manpage will help, but there
may be some broken prepath mounts before users get around to reading
it.

-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton at redhat.com>


More information about the linux-cifs-client mailing list