To complete the picture, I finally tracked down the mysterious PerlDir_map(A|W) to win32\vdir.h. This appears to be a C++ Dir object class stolen from somewhere.

The MapPath(A|W) methods are very strange indeed. They eventually call GetFullPathName(A|W) to convert relative paths to absolute paths, but go through a heap of pre-conditioning of the input path before doing so. This pre-conditioning appears to be intended to work around bugs in that API that existed back then.

However, GetFullPathName still exibits some very peculiar bugs, including rendering various non-pathnames as the cwd as described earlier.

This problem is an accumulation of OS bugs, a couple of perl implementation fopars, and too many layers. It's gonna be a bitch to fix.

Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
"Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algoritm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon

In reply to Re^3: -e " " returns true by BrowserUk
in thread -e " " returns true by PerlingTheUK

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