What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?

[Rahul Dhesi]

I suggest finding a better syntax for root than "/".  It can lead to
filenames containing // and it takes special case code [note 1] to
handle such filenames.  And some systems want // to mean something
special.

On the other hand, if you call root "root", then "cd root" can be
ambiguous (as was pointed out to me today).

How about reserving a leading ^ to mean root and temporarily accepting
a leading / as a synonym for compatibility?

     ^/usr/bin == /usr/bin
     cd ^      == cd /

For networking, ^^ could be special, sort of like // but without the
overloading of //.

Note 1.  UNIX handles // by assuming that there is a null filename
component between the two slashes.  Unfortunately this allows legal
filenames like /bin//cat and even /bin//////cat which, if a program is
trying to parse pathanmes, is painful.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <dhesi at bsu-cs.bsu.edu>
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