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by vermilingua 3679 days ago
In file:///, the file:// part signifies the protocol (think http://) and the / in /path/to/file signifies the root directory (think / in /home/user/)

I have never seen file:/ used before, so I can't really comment, but it seems invalid to me (and browsers auto-redirect it to ///).
1 comments
jameshart 3679 days ago
Almost.

The file: signifies the protocol. The /// is actually //<machinename>/ with an empty machinename as a shorthand for 'localhost'.

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MoSal 3679 days ago
Interesting.

Why is this interpreted as a relative path?

     cd /etc
     curl file://resolv.conf
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throwanem 3679 days ago
Well, it's ill-formed, so what the UA does with it isn't really specified; cURL presumably treats it as a path relative to . because that's what the developer(s) decided that cURL should do. (For comparison, Firefox transforms it into file:///resolv.conf, then tries to find /resolv.conf on localhost and fails.)
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