According to Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic(a)srce.hr&gt;, one should use: (expand-file-name "man/man1" "/usr/local") -- Darryl Okahata darrylo(a)sr.hp.com DISCLAIMER: this message is the author's personal opinion and does not constitute the support, opinion, or policy of Hewlett-Packard, or of the little green men that have been following him all day.

If you hard-code paths, then, yes, this can be a problem. [ However, your example is slightly wrong. You should have used: (expand-file-name "man\\man1" "\\usr\\local") => "c:\\usr\\local\\man\\man1" Note that, if backslashes are used in elisp strings, you need to quote the backslashes, just as if you're writing C code. Further note that this is not a problem with the read-file-name stuff, as the quoting is automatically done for you. ] If you write paths using forward slashes, then there isn't a problem. MSDOS is just as happy with forward slashes as it is with backward slashes. We just need to tell elisp programmers to always use forward slashes, if they must type a directory separator. It's not that big a deal really, aside from programmer education. [ Pet peeve alert: I understand that we're stuck with this "/" vs "\" bogosity in XEmacs, but this was a very, very bad decision. XEmacs should have been made to always use "/". Yes, this would be different, but it would not have broken lots of code (e.g., efs, w3, etc.). ] -- Darryl Okahata darrylo(a)sr.hp.com DISCLAIMER: this message is the author's personal opinion and does not constitute the support, opinion, or policy of Hewlett-Packard, or of the little green men that have been following him all day.

Darryl Okahata wrote: [snip] This was, if I recall correctly, Kirill's and my decision and I still think that it's the right one for two reasons: - Users expect to see the separator that they expect to see. How would you feel if XEmacs on UNIX used '\' everywhere just because that's what XEmacs on win32 uses? - The base win32 API does accept '/' as a separator, but most command-line programs, including the shell, don't. Other parts of the win32 API such as the "File Open" dialogs also don't. The required lisp-level code changes to support OS-dependant separators are not extensive; w3 didn't need changing at all in the end, and if I recall correctly the required changes to efs amount to changing four lines, three of which are currently doing the wrong thing on UNIX systems anyway. There exist more widespread changes that are required to make XEmacs work well on win32, which are unrelated to the separator issue. For instance the requirement that authors use (temp-directory) instead of "/tmp". Jonathan. -- Jonathan Harris | jhar(a)tardis.ed.ac.uk London, England | Jonathan.Harris(a)symbian.com