[PLUG] Found a strange file node on my Linux System

[Jon Scully]

On 6/9/06, Robert Jeffrey Miesen <bobby_miesen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hi.
>
>         I was navigating my system today and instead of typing in "cd /",
> I typed
> in "cd //". Much to my suprise, I went to a directory called '//'. It's
> contents seem to be the same as that of the root directory, but I find the
> two backslashes to be quite weird. Can anybody replicate this behavior on
> their system and/or tell me more about this "Double-root" directory?
>
>         Thanks in advance.


It's supposed to work that way.  It's sort of a convenience or "feature" ;-)

Try 'ls -l //home//username', for example.  Same as 'ls -l /home/username'.
Kind of a nice feature when you're trying to concatenate strings in a shell
script and don't want to create three or four constants for the same meaning
-- "home", "home/",  "/home" and "/home/" -- when just plain HOME="/home/"
will get things done.