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In unix/linux, any number of consecutive forwardslashes in a path is generally equivalent to a single forwardslash. eg.

$ cd /home/shum
$ pwd
/home/shum
$ cd /home//shum
$ pwd
/home/shum
$ cd /home///shum
$ pwd
/home/shum

Yet for some reason two forwardslashes at the beginning of an absolute path is treated specially. eg.

$ cd ////home
$ pwd
/home
$ cd ///
$ pwd
/
$ cd //
$ pwd
//
$ cd home//shum
$ pwd
//home/shum

Any other number of consecutive forwardslashes anywhere else in a patch gets truncated, but two at the beginning will remain, even if you then navigate around the filesystem relative to it.

Why is this? Is there any difference between /... and //... ?

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7
  • That doesn’t happen on Solaris, Darwin, or OpenBSD.
    – tchrist
    Apr 29, 2011 at 3:34
  • @tchrist: This behavior is specific to Bourne shell; you are probably using zsh or the like.
    – u1686_grawity
    Apr 29, 2011 at 13:14
  • 1
    @thchrist: 1) What do you mean by "namei()"? If you are referring to a syscall or library function, then I haven't yet heard of such. There's only a /usr/bin/namei, but it is not related. 2) It is a shell thing, since it only happens with sh and bash, but not with zsh/csh/tcsh, nor with the chdir() syscall. 3) It happens on "the others" - I just tested NetBSD 5.0 and FreeBSD 6.3, and cd //bin shows exactly the same behavior.
    – u1686_grawity
    Apr 29, 2011 at 13:28
  • 4
    I hate to nag, but it's called a ‘slash’. There's the ‘slash’ and the ‘backslash’. The ‘forward slash’ (sic) seems to be a recent construct, and I mostly hear it from people on TV.
    – Alexios
    Feb 21, 2012 at 9:05
  • 1
    Related: unix.stackexchange.com/q/256497/22565
    – Stéphane Chazelas
    Sep 29, 2016 at 16:31

3 Answers 3

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58

For the most part, repeated slahes in a path are equivalent to a single slash. This behavior is mandated by POSIX and most applications follow suit. The exception is that “a pathname that begins with two successive slashes may be interpreted in an implementation-defined manner” (but ///foo is equivalent to /foo).

Most unices don't do anything special with two initial slashes. Linux, in particular, doesn't. Cygwin does: //hostname/path accesses a network drive (SMB).

What you're seeing is not, in fact, Linux doing anything special with //: it's bash's current directory tracking. Compare:

$ bash -c 'cd //; pwd'
//
$ bash -c 'cd //; /bin/pwd'
/

Bash is taking the precaution that the OS might be treating // specially and keeping it. Dash does the same. Ksh and zsh don't when they're running on Linux, I guess (I haven't checked) they have a compile-time setting.

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3
  • Interesting; when I do bash -c 'cd //; /bin/pwd', I get //.  Cygwin (8.23-4) with bash version 4.1.17(9)-release and pwd (GNU coreutils) 8.23.  Even more surprising, I still get // if I do /bin/pwd -P.
    – G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica'
    Oct 29, 2015 at 20:49
  • For the record, fish does not do this. If you run cd //; pwd, or fish -c 'cd //; pwd', you get /, and if you run the former with a default prompt, the prompt has just 1 slash.
    – trysis
    Sep 29, 2016 at 15:02
  • @trysis Nor do zsh, ksh, pdksh, dash, hush, … Of the shells commonly found on Linux, bash is the only one that preserves a leading //.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Sep 29, 2016 at 16:15
22

From the POSIX Specification:

A pathname that begins with two successive slashes may be interpreted in an implementation-defined manner, although more than two leading slashes shall be treated as a single slash.

I assume Linux bash keeps this behavior in case there's a compelling future use.

(I've always heard that Al Viro kept it in place because there is a feature from Plan9 that uses it, and he'd like to have that feature in Linux, but I'm having trouble finding that feature in my Plan9 documentation. But, since it is in bash instead, Al probably doesn't have anything to do with it.)

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4
  • 3
    I remember that double slash to allow remote file system access in an early system V implementation (Utek V & DFS). The syntax was //servername/path. Just like Solaris automounter would use now /net/servername/path.
    – jlliagre
    Apr 29, 2011 at 9:39
  • 3
    Linux doesn't do anything about //, it's bash.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Apr 29, 2011 at 10:11
  • 1
    @jlliagre: I remember that from AT&T RFS. (Remote File System) Was in System V.
    – janm
    Nov 8, 2011 at 11:52
  • Python's posixpath.normpath() function also retains double leading slashes. I tried to find out why, which brought me here. It's unfortunate that it does this, because what I've read indicates that double leading slashes is no longer important.
    – Mr. Lance E Sloan
    Jul 8, 2016 at 20:42
9

According to the POSIX definition, paths starting with a double-slash (//) "...may be interpreted in an implementation-defined manner, although more than two leading slashes shall be treated as a single slash." If you use csh, for example, it doesn't act the same way:

% bash -c 'cd //; pwd'
//
% csh -c 'cd //; pwd'
/

Bash appears to be storing the directory, and pwd is reporting the $PWD, while csh appears to be using the getcwd() function to get the actual directory.

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1
  • And zsh acts like csh, but does the trimming by itself.
    – Stéphane Gimenez
    Oct 7, 2011 at 17:08

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