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Parsing is the operation used to convert a namestring into a pathname.
Except in the case of parsing logical pathname namestrings,
this operation is implementation-dependent, because the format of namestrings is implementation-dependent.
A conforming implementation is free to accommodate other file system features in its pathname representation and provides a parser that can process such specifications in namestrings. Conforming programs must not depend on any such features, since those features will not be portable.