hemphill@nrl-aic.UUCP.UUCP (12/27/86)
Having followed this discussion for a while, I find it strange that no one has made it explicit that the generic pathname implementation on Symbolics machines is not really tied to NFILE. I have been using my Symbolics machine to access files on a variety of machines (BSD-4.2, IRIS System V, TOPS-20 etc.) none of which have NFILE servers. I can quite happily use DIRED, edit my programs/text, compile my systems, and read/write my data files in exactly the same manner used for files on the Symbolics file server or my local Symbolics machine. In normal use the pathnames look like paths on the target machines, but that can even hidden by using logical hosts. In short, this discussion has gotten sidetracked into the issue of pathname representations rather than the underlying issues of network filesystems -- data representation, file attributes, access methods, security etc. G++ <hemphill@nrl-aic.arpa>