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Comment by jameshart | Hacker News Reader

Almost.

The file: signifies the protocol. The /// is actually //<machinename>/ with an empty machinename as a shorthand for 'localhost'.

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Interesting.

Why is this interpreted as a relative path?

     cd /etc
     curl file://resolv.conf

Well, it's ill-formed, so what the UA does with it isn't really specified; cURL presumably treats it as a path relative to . because that's what the developer(s) decided that cURL should do. (For comparison, Firefox transforms it into file:///resolv.conf, then tries to find /resolv.conf on localhost and fails.)

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