Re: Directories/Files

[Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

>     Sri> I'm still a bit hazy on how a:
> 
>     Sri> cd fonts:
> 
>     Sri> would translate in a shell.  From what I gather, a gconf call
>     Sri> would be made to look up fonts: and it would translate it
>     Sri> into a shell variable which would replace fonts: with
>     Sri> something appropriate.
> 
> Try this:
> 	$ export fonts=/usr/lib/X11/fonts/
> 	$ ls $fonts
> 	$ cd $fonts
> 	$ ... etc

Shell expansion I understand.  In fact, I have such a variable as you've
defined in your example.  But what you propose needs to be done at the
shell level.

> (The '$fonts' style syntax is standard in the unix world.  It
> should probably be used over Amiga style logical device names).

Certainly, you should follow unix semantics not amiga. :-)

> The current implementation uses a corba interface so there is
> overhead, but in reality it's probably not noticable.  I guess someone
> just needs to sit down and hack it in to see how much of a problem it
> really is :).

Regardless, even if it's a little  overhead there will be
overhead.  Adding a feature like this will require some thinking.  It
should scale from a crappy Pentium 100, 16MB machine to a Pentium III 
900Mhz 128MB machine.

	sri