On Fri, 4 Nov 2016, Mike Crowe wrote:

> Rightly or wrongly, we've used URLs like "file://test.txt" in many of our
> unit tests which are now failing. :(

First: I don't think it is clear in any spec that local file:// URLs actually
work.

I reverted the 3bb273db7e commit in a local branch and tested what exactly
worked with a relative path before this change. It turns out it works in one
specific case and it doesn't work for a lot of others that should work if we'd
consider file: paths to be fully relative.

Works: you can get a file in the current directory if you used a messed up
URL (tests run in the curl source tree root):

   $ ./src/curl file://README

But note that file: URLs have a hostname that can be blank after the two
slashes so for the URL to be perfectly nicely formatted it should actually be
file://localhost/README spelled out fully or file:///README with the host name
inhibited.

These don't work:

   $ ./src/curl file://localhost/README
   curl: (37) Couldn't open file /README

   $ ./src/curl file:///README
   curl: (37) Couldn't open file /README

... or why not try a file in a subdirectory relative to where we invoke curl
with the initial funny two-slashes URL format:

   $ ./src/curl file://docs/README.md
   curl: (37) Couldn't open file /README.md

and just to make sure that using three slashes doesn't magically fix this
case:

   $ ./src/curl file:///docs/README.md
   curl: (37) Couldn't open file /docs/README.md

Conclusion:

file:// didn't work very good for relaive file paths before this commit
either, only in a single case for exactly the current directory. The story is
now much more consistent since all cases seem to work the same way.

I'm leaning to say that you should rather insert pwd somewhere, like this:

   $ ./src/curl file://`pwd`/docs/README.md

   or

   $ ./src/curl file://`pwd`/README

... which both should work fine, both before and after commit 3bb273db7e.

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
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