11. How file names, directories and paths are mangled and managed.

11.1 Breaking a path into its components.

11.1 Breaking a path into its components.

TRAMP filenames are somewhat different, obviously, to ordinary path names. As such, the lisp functions file-name-directory and file-name-nondirectory are overridden within the TRAMP package.

Their replacements are reasonably simplistic in their approach. They dissect the filename, call the original handler on the remote path and then rebuild the TRAMP path with the result.

This allows the platform specific hacks in the original handlers to take effect while preserving the TRAMP path information.