[fsckboy]

that's not a cp difference, cp is the granddaddy here

I think trailing / could be a nice way to indicate some meaningful difference, but since autocomplete always sticks it in, just feels like a bad idea to me. I might like it if directory names always had to have a trailing /, but I am less motivated by "convenience of common cases" and much more by "absolute precision/specificity/unambiguity" belt and suspenders.

(kind of unrelated but along the same lines, I toy with the idea of getting rid of . and .. visible in the filesystem, and make them only part of the syntax of paths. then you could have unambiguous multiple links to a directory: ".. is where you came from" and .. in the root is still the root, so chroot works too)

[m463]

I think . and .. are useful. there's also perforce's ... which I find interesting (for example foo/... means everything below directory "foo")