4.5.2 Syntactic Rewriting

A file specification must be an atom or a compound term with arity 1. Such compound terms are transformed to atoms as described in ref-fdi-fsp. Let FileSpec be the given or transformed atomic file specification.

The file specification user stands for the standard input or output stream, depending on context.

A file specification FileSpec other than user is subject to syntactic rewriting. Depending on the operation, the resulting absolute filename is subject to further processing. Syntactic rewriting is performed wrt. a context directory Context (an absolute path), in the following steps:

The following UNIX examples assumes that Context is `/usr/'; that the environment variables VAR1, VAR2, VAR3 have the values `/opt/bin', `foo' and `~/temp' respectively and that the home directory of the current user, `joe', is `/home/joe'.

     
     /foo/bar
        ==> /foo/bar
     
     /foo/.//bar/../blip///
        ==> /foo/blip
     
     /foo//../bar/../../blip
        ==> error
     
     $VAR1/../local/
        ==> /opt/local
     
     $VAR2/misc/.
        ==> /usr/foo/misc
     
     $VAR3/misc/.
        ==> /home/joe/temp/misc
     
     ~joe/../jenny/bin.
        ==> /home/jenny/bin
     

The following Windows examples assume that Context is `C:/Source/proj1'; that the environment variables VAR1, VAR2, VAR3 have the values `\\server\docs\brian', `foo' and `~/temp' respectively and that the home directory of the current user is `C:/home'.

     
     /foo/bar
        ==> C:/foo/bar
     
     foo//../../blip
        ==> c:/source/blip
     
     $VAR1/../local/
        ==> //server/docs/local
     
     $VAR2/misc/.
        ==> c:/source/proj1/foo/misc
     
     $VAR3/misc/.
        ==> c:/home/temp/misc
     
     ~joe/../jenny/bin.
        ==> error
     

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