Tell HN: cd // Is Special | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: cd // Is Special

9 pointskeepamovin5 comments

Yep. That is all. I just discovered this. Almost a 20 year bash user. A typo today led me down this somewhat short rabbit hole:

  [...]@MacBook-Air:~$ cd //
  [...]@MacBook-Air://$ pwd
  //
  [...]@MacBook-Air://$ cd /
  [...]@MacBook-Air:/$ cd //
  [...]@MacBook-Air://$ cd ///
  [...]@MacBook-Air:/$ cd ////
  [...]@MacBook-Air:/$ cd //
  [...]@MacBook-Air://$

I checked on a Debian box and same thing. Both cases bash is ~ v5.2 but I guess this is a long time thing. Who woulda thought?

I kinda like the double slash. Very internet-y. I wonder if that's related to why TBL included (apparently later regretting) the '//' in URLs?

Does not work this way in Zsh. What's the purpose of that in Bash?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20690828/what-does-doubl...

Thank you for that! This was particularly interesting:

Certain versions of Unix, and early network file systems, used paths of the form //hostname/path to access 'path' on server 'hostname'.

It directly ties in with the URL format:

scheme://hostname/path/to/file

How cool it would be if we could go:

  cd //google.com/search?q=quack+like+duck

and we would get a directory with 1 file per result (or to be really unix like: 1 directory per result, with a set of files and directories for different aspects of the result hehehe :))

This is an old idea behind “everything is file” and plan9, afaik. FUSE allows this, you can easily write a “driver” that does exactly this on a mountpoint like /mnt/mywebfs/whatever.com/search?q=….

/proc (procfs) is basically this but for kernel structures.

I recall somebody did this with www, I think at first using a browser extension? Webfs possibly.

It is a really cool idea. I find it makes many things easy to deal with, and those that aren’t? Interesting to think about.

The hierarchical abstraction of a file system is a good model from many things

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