Re: AFP server with OpenBSD for Mac OS X file sharing

From: Sriranga Veeraraghavan (ranga_at_soda.csua.berkeley.edu)
Date: 09/19/03 

Date: 19 Sep 2003 09:03:03 -0700

nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates) writes:

> The Mac must be faking it, then, because "/" (forward slash) is the
> (one true) directory separator used by Unix. MacOS X is based on a
> FreeBSD kernel, and the pure versions of FreeBSD all use "/". ":" is
> the old MacOS (1-9) way of separating directories, and wasn't usable
> back then.

MacOS X stores directory names for HFS+ on disk using ':' as the
directory separator. The VFS layer converts ':' to '/' so that unix
and cocoa apps see '/' as the directory separator. Some MacOS apps
(carbon/classic) still use ':' as the directory separator so the
carbon lib converts '/' back to ':' so that these apps continue to
work properly.

Wilfredo Sanchez has a nice article on this and other MacOS X/UNIX
integration issues:

http://www.mit.edu/people/wsanchez/papers/USENIX_2000/

--ranga