Eh, the code is not that bad but it's weird that they don't scan from the right instead of the left to find 'xxx//yyy//zzz' (which means ignore 'xxx/' because y

Eh, the code is not that bad but it's weird that they don't scan from the right instead of the left to find 'xxx//yyy//zzz' (which means ignore 'xxx/' because you began a new path with '/yyy', but ignore '/yyy' also because you began a new path with '/zzz'). Here is the same code in JOE (which has no VMS support and which treats foo/../bar and bar as different files - the original emacs code was written before symlinks!). JOE has a variable length string library, so you see 'vsncpy' instead of the alloca / strcpy / strcat / make_string. http://sourceforge.net/p/joe-editor/mercurial/ci/default/tree/joe/b.c#l2534 http://sourceforge.net/p/joe-editor/mercurial/ci/default/tre... Edit: Holy Cow! The new version in emacs is much more involved: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/src/fileio.c#L757 https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/src/fileio... "For technical reasons, this function can return correct but non-intuitive results for the root directory; for instance, (expand-file-name ".." "/") returns "/.."... " :-)