[Bioperl-l] Why is '+' a delimiter in $OBDA_SEARCH_PATH?

[Lincoln Stein]

What was wrong with using ";" then?  It's unlikely to be found in Unix path 
names because of its meaning to the shell.

Lincoln

On Thursday 22 May 2003 10:13 am, Brian Osborne wrote:
> Andreas,
>
> >The standard search path delimiter is the ':' (see you $PATH
> >variable for example).
>
> Of course you're right. It's the Windows PATH that's delimited by ';'.
>
> Brian O.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andreas Kahari [mailto:ak at ebi.ac.uk]
> Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 10:03 AM
> To: Brian Osborne
> Cc: bioperl-l at bioperl.org
> Subject: Re: [Bioperl-l] Why is '+' a delimiter in $OBDA_SEARCH_PATH?
>
> On Thu, May 22, 2003 at 07:48:47AM -0400, Brian Osborne wrote:
> > Bioperl-l,
> > The character '+' is being used a delimiter in this variable instead of
>
> the
>
> > standard Unix ';'. If I'm not mistaken one can use '+' in a directory or
> > file name, whereas ';' seems not to be allowed. In fact, isn't
>
> "lost+found"
>
> > a system directory in some Unixes? Anyway, I will change this unless
>
> someone
>
> > can convince me not to.
> > Brian O.
>
> The ';' may be part of a directory or file name without any
> problem (just quote it for the shell).  The forward slash
> ('/'), however, is not allowed on Unix-type systems (Mac OS
> X might have additional restrictions with ':'?).
>
> The plus sign is very uncommon in file names, and the
> "lost+found" directory (where 'fsck' stores files and
> directories which doesn't have an associated name after a
> system or disk crash) is about the only place I've ever
> seen it...  Having said that I haven't seen ';' in a name
> *anywhere*, but it's allowed.
>
>     mkdir ';'
>     ls -ldF ';'
>     drwxr-x--x  2 ak       ensembl     4096 May 22 14:00 ;/
>
> The standard search path delimiter is the ':' (see you $PATH
> variable for example).
>
> Andreas

-- 
========================================================================
Lincoln D. Stein                           Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
lstein at cshl.org			                  Cold Spring Harbor, NY
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