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   clacke@libranet.de is my main (notclacke@fedia.social)'s status on Sunday, 09-Mar-2025 22:29:46 JST clacke@libranet.de is my main

   • Rich Felker

   @hipsterelectron @dalias Yeah, I would say \temp is neither relative nor absolute. 🤢

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Sunday, 09-Mar-2025 22:52:12 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @notclacke @hipsterelectron Exactly. And it's so stupid that Microsoft hasn't fixed this artifact of DOS. Current drive should be locked at C: and \ should thereby always be relative to that. And C: should be a virtual absolute root, not the first hard drive.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Luna R (lunarood@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Monday, 10-Mar-2025 00:20:30 JST Luna R

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias @notclacke @hipsterelectron Windows drives are the source of so much inconsistency! They really should've gotten rid of this nonsense. DOS compatibility is already all over the place anyway.

     Besides the whole "absolute" path with additional state nonsense, there's also the whole thing with inconsistent working directory handling, where they inject messed up pseudo env vars to keep behaviour "compatible" with DOS. That's a fun one to look into, for anyone wanting to be *more* horrified.

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     clacke@libranet.de is my main (notclacke@fedia.social)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Mar-2025 00:14:43 JST clacke@libranet.de is my main

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Luna R

     @lunarood Horrify us! I grew up fighting the "com bat files", as some of us called them, and moved up from there through Windows 3.0, 3.1, 95 and XP, but this quirk sounds new to me.
     
     @dalias @hipsterelectron

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     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Mar-2025 00:18:34 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Luna R

     @notclacke @hipsterelectron @lunarood You don't remember typing A:, doing some stuff on floppy, then typing C: and getting back to the same dir you were in on the HDD?

     That wasn't just COMMAND.COM shell behavior, but actual OS state in DOS that Windows preserved as local to the process. 🤮

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     clacke@libranet.de is my main (notclacke@fedia.social)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Mar-2025 09:21:12 JST clacke@libranet.de is my main

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Luna R

     @dalias Yes! I described that elsewhere in the thread. Each drive has a current directory, and your actual current directory is determined by your current drive and the current directory of that drive. Is that state what you mean by pseudo environment variable?
     
     @hipsterelectron @lunarood

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     Luna R (lunarood@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Thursday, 13-Mar-2025 20:02:17 JST Luna R

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @notclacke @dalias @hipsterelectron Not quite. What I was referencing, which Cassandrich expanded upon, is the particular way in which this DOS behaviour was "ported" to Windows.

     It's handled in the process environment, rather than at the OS level. Technically they are actual environment variables, so my "pseudo" was kinda misleading, but they use a mangled naming scheme to avoid collisions with other vars.

     The link I posted in another reply goes into more detail (some of it in the comments).

     clacke@libranet.de is my main likes this.
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     clacke@libranet.de is my main (notclacke@fedia.social)'s status on Thursday, 13-Mar-2025 20:04:23 JST clacke@libranet.de is my main

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Luna R

     @lunarood Aha! Gotcha. Making them actual environment variables with special names rather than process attributes is an "interesting" choice. They do affect the behavior of native Windows processes, right?
     
     @dalias @hipsterelectron

     clacke repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     clacke@libranet.de is my main (notclacke@fedia.social)'s status on Thursday, 13-Mar-2025 20:33:04 JST clacke@libranet.de is my main

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Luna R

     Whereas in Win32, there is only one current directoryI have been lied to by CMD.EXE. 🤯
     
     So does D:some_dir even have meaning in the system? I'll have to find a Windows machine and experiment.
     
     web.archive.org/web/20180813013919/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100506-00/?p=14133
     
     /via stackoverflow.com/questions/53078528/how-to-get-current-working-directory-of-another-drive-in-batch/53078745#comment93054937_53078745
     /via mastodon.gamedev.place/@lunarood/114144521393298888
     
     @lunarood @dalias @hipsterelectron

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 13-Mar-2025 21:46:17 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Luna R

     @notclacke @hipsterelectron @lunarood Wow this is even more cursed than I expected. So what does d:foo mean when d: isn't the drive of the real current working directory? Same as d:\foo?

     And what does \foo mean? Is it relative to the root of the drive letter of the current working directory? Or what?

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     Luna R (lunarood@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 14-Mar-2025 23:57:30 JST Luna R

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias @notclacke @hipsterelectron Now, tying this all back to d@nny's original issue... taking all the variations in behaviour into account... I think we can all confidently say that the full, definitive, exhaustive answer is: 🤷♀️

     clacke likes this.
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     Luna R (lunarood@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Friday, 14-Mar-2025 23:57:32 JST Luna R

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias @notclacke @hipsterelectron Haha, looks like you are all thoroughly horrified! Mission accomplished! 😇

     As for those two questions about the paths... my assumption is that, on Windows (without cmd.exe), the answer is "yes" in both cases. Though I can't verify this... it's been years since I had to deal with a Windows box.

     clacke likes this.