Re: [9fans] File server for NT

[Keith Nash <kjn9@citizenearth.com>]

> it never was on lunix, but on plan 9 your path had to be:
>
>    .
>    /bin
>
> to preserve some sort of semantic sanity, given 'everyone is a mortal' on
> plan 9.

Putting "." at the head of the path means that a system tool will be overridden by anything in the current directory that happens to have the same name.  This practice is not advised in Lunix; I have often wondered why it was adopted in Plan 9.

Telling Plan 9 to execute dir/tool causes it to look for $path/dir/tool, not ./dir/tool - a consistent and elegant choice of design.

I'm not sure whether by 'semantic sanity' you mean preserving an aspect of Lunix' inconsistency in order to provide users with a familiar environment.  This isn't the choice that Plan 9's designers usually made.

Does anything break if path is set to just "/bin", or to "/bin ."?  For example, in
cd foo
mk
developers are free to place their own substitutes for system commands along with their source files in directory foo.  Does the official Plan 9 software ever do this?  Even if it doesn't, 3rd-party software might, which suggests that we are stuck with using the ". /bin" default for ever.