RFC: path display and path filtering features.

[Grant Edwards]

On 2011-02-18, Roland McGrath <roland at redhat.com> wrote:
>> We could canonicalize absolute pathname arguments.
>> We even could canonicalize relative pathname arguments using
>> /proc/$pid/cwd.
>> But I'm not sure now whether we really need this or not.
>
> Given per-process mount namespace, this could be error prone.
> At least, it takes extra care to consider /proc/$pid/root too.
> So I'd avoid that complexity to start with.

I think there will probably be cases that won't work right no matter
what we do.  If a file exists with multiple canonical paths, then
there's pretty much no way to deal with that without requiring the
user to specify all of them.

So it comes down to what cases matter the most.

For my use cases, it's acceptable to expect the user to enter a
canonical path and expect the program to open the file with a
canonical path. I expect that there are other common use cases where
that's not acceptable.

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