~foldername convention for homepages 1

[xor]

I notice that a common convention among many ISPs and free hosts is to give out URLs for personal homepages that look like this:

http://www.hostname.com/~foldername

I was wondering where that comes from? Is there some special significance that IIS applies to the ~ or is it just one of those defacto standards?

I am asking because I want to set up personal homepages for a few people on one of the servers that I manage and I want the names to be like their login names but slightly different. Ideally I'd like them to be able to ftp into the homepages folder but be automatically sent to their own folder. I've seen and article describing how to do this, and have managed to set it before, but I'm wondering what will happen with the ~ at the beginning of the folder names now. The New Zealand Site

http://www.thenewzealandsite.com

 

[rewebb]

~ is a valid character in foldernames on Windows. So why should there be a problem?

Oh, the ~username convention is a hangover from Unix servers (I think!)

Rob W

 

[sleipnir214]

rewebb,
"Hangover" is not the right word.

One difference between Unix variants and Win32 is that since any Unix installation is expected to be a simultaneous multi-user environment, the fact that a user has a home directory actually has some meaning. This is in contrast to Win32, which without Citrix, Terminal Server, or a similar technology, expects only one user to be logged in at a time to a machine.

When a user logs into a Unix system shell, he is placed in that directory to start. When logging in via FTP, a user is typically jailed to his home directory -- a lack that has irritated me about IIS's FTP implementation since day one.

So "~" isn't a hangover -- it's a meaningful and useful construct in the Unix world.


xor,
You might take a look here:

http://www.roth.net/isapi/home/

This company makes a downloadable ISAPI filter for IIS which might do what you're looking for. I can't give you any recommendations, though -- I've never used it. ______________________________________________________________________
TANSTAAFL!

 

[rewebb]

sleipnir214, I described it as a "hangover" (maybe I should have said "leftover&quot from Unix precisely because Windows is not a multi-user environment. The ~ has no sensible place on a Windows system...

Rob W and sleipnir214 violently agreeing with each other