[tex-k] Problems for HOME with trailing "/"

[Harald Hanche-Olsen]

+ karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry):

>     kpsewhich (probably other kpathsea tools as well) are incredibly
>     slow when called with ${HOME} having a trailing slash.
> 
> Well, at least if you have a large home directory :).

Which you will, if you're root ... Or perhaps HOME=/ will cause
different behaviour already?

Anecdote of dubious relevance:

Back in the days of Apollo computers, you could access files on other
machines on the local network by //hostname/some/path.  (In fact, to
this day, I believe POSIX specifies that a leading // in a pathname
may have special significance.)  This would break things in
interesting ways when some program run by root specified
$HOME/some/path:  Enough so that I changed root's home directory from
"/" to "/.".  (Don't get me started on embedded references to
environment variables in filenames.)

- Harald