Question

I’ve tried this in CentOS 5.6 and Debian 6.02, both guests running under VirtualBox 4.04, and it works in both.

If you type cd //, it takes you to root like normal, but the pwd is //. Other than that, everything is like a regular root. You can traverse the filesystem like normal, but as long as all the paths you enter are relative, the double // will remain. What’s going on here?

Answer 1

From the accepted answer at the link given by delnan:

A pathname that begins with two successive slashes may be interpreted in an implementation-defined manner, although more than two leading slashes shall be treated as a single slash.

Looks like it’s a part of the Single Unix Spec.

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap04.html#tag_04_11