[Python-Dev] Pathlib enhancments - method name only (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Sun Apr 10 11:03:27 EDT 2016

On Sun, 10 Apr 2016 18:51:23 +1200, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

> On 9 April 2016 at 23:02, R. David Murray <rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote: > >>That is, a 'filename' is the identifier we've assigned to this thing >>pointed to by an inode in linux, but an os path is a text representation >>of the path from the root filename to a specified filename. That is, >>the path is the name, so to say "path name" sounds redundant and >>confusing to me.

The term "pathname" is what is conventionally used to refer to a textual string passed to the OS to identify an object in the file system. It's often abbreviated to just "path", but that's ambiguous for our purposes, because "path" can also refer to one of our higher-level objects.

I find it interesting that in all my years of unix computing I've never run into this (at least so that I became concious of it). I see now that in fact the Posix spec uses 'pathname'.

Objection, such as it was, completely withdrawn :)

(Nick's point about Path object vs path is also a good one.)

--David

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list