Re: file-readable-p returns t for empty string

[David Kastrup]

eliz@is.elta.co.il (Eli Zaretskii) writes:

> On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Richard Stallman wrote:
> 
> >     That's because all these primitives call expand-file-name internally,
> >     and expand-file-name returns the buffer's default directory when
> >     passed an empty string as an argument.
> > 
> >     I don't know off the top of my head why does expand-file-name do that.
> > 
> > Do you have something better to suggest?
> 
> No.  I'd bet some feature already uses that.

Then that feature should explicitly check for the empty string if it
needs to have it treated as the current directory.  I don't think it
prudent to have (file-exists-p "") return t.  It probably means that
one needs to be careful that one does not collapse away "./" in the
course of canonicizing file names if that would leave the empty
string.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
Email: David.Kastrup@t-online.de