What is the issue with the "dreaded trailing slash"?

By: Richard Glaser - Revised: 2006-05-31 devin

A trailing slash in a transcript will cause problems with the radmind tool, fsdiff, because it reads from the file system:

   /path/to/directory

But, will read from the transcript:

   /path/to/directory/

Which does not match, and will not give expected results. It will cause radmind to descend into directories listed in the negative with the trailing slash.

For example, if you have a trailing slash for /dev in your negative:

   d /dev/   0555   0   0

The radmind tools will determine that the file system object is /dev and the negative transcript is /dev/. These do not match and will cause radmind to descend into /dev. To solve this remove the trailing slash from the transcript line.

Note, radmind 1.4 or later should remove the trailing slash when you use fsdiff to create transcript lines, like:

   fsdiff -1 /dev/

Will remove the trailing slash from the outputed transcript line:

   d /dev   0555   0   0

This means that the common tab-completion "mistake" in the shell that
usually created the situation:

   fsdiff -K /de[tab]v/

... should no longer be an issue, unless you manually add the trailing slash to your transcript line's path.