Agreed. I should have been more precise in my scoping of the problem (and have updated my original post accordingly). My particular use cases for this routine involves paths that can be presumed to be real file names. But others interested in a "comparePath" function might have different goals. Even in cases where that assumption can't be made, Perl offers, what I presume is, a portable way to identify symbolic links (-l, for example) so those could easily be filtered out and removed from consideration. Or alternatively one could use a function like readlink to convert the link to its real name. Do you have experiences where readlink and -l have caused problems?

Come to think of it, I don't know how to detect mounts. Is -l also used?

Best, beth

In reply to Re^2: How does compare the relationship between two file system paths in a portable way? by ELISHEVA
in thread How does one compare the relationship between two file system paths in a portable way? by ELISHEVA

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.