🚀 go-pugleaf

       When HOME is "/usr/dept/lnds", Emacs can find ~/.emacs, but
    when HOME is "/usr/dept/lnds/", it can't.

That does sound like a bug, however,
     
       I had been under the impression that the terminating slash 
    served a valuable purpose:  if my directory is a symbolic
    link and people cd to it, they know where they really are.  Is it
    true, as one source tells me, that a directory string with a 
    terminating slash means something special to BSD-derived systems,
    but not to SVR3-derived systems like Irix?  

This is not true.  The trailing slash has no significance to any
system that I know of except Emacs.

						Is it true, as another
    source tells me, that Emacs's supposed failure to parse "//" in 
    paths makes it non-POSIX-compliant?  Why is there no mention of
    this in the PROBLEMS file?  I can't believe that I'm the first
    person to experience this problem.

Yes, this is true.  Do you consider it a problem?  I don't.  I see no
reason to hand "//" to my OS, so I don't care that Emacs can't.  And
the use Emacs does put "//" to is very handy.  Oh, perhaps you mean a
leading "//"?  Well, that wouldn't interfere with the normal use Emacs
makes of "//", so that would be a reasonable thing to add.

If you are the first person to experience this problem, it is because
there is only one system (that I know of) that uses leading-// and it
doesn't support Emacs very well.

 < Stephen
   MIT X Consortium