The Old New Thing

The path-searching algorithm is not a backtracking algorithm

February 8, 2012 Feb 8, 2012 02/8/12

Raymond Chen

Suppose your PATH environment variable looks like this: Suppose that you call intending to load the library at . If the network server is down, the call will fail. Why doesn't it just skip the bad directory in the PATH and continue searching? Suppose the function skipped the bad network directory and kept searching. Suppose that the ...