In some circumstances, what is wanted is a Lisp pathname object which corresponds to a string produced by the Operating System. In this case, some of the default parsing rules are inappropriate: most filesystems do not have a native understanding of wild pathnames; such functionality is often provided by shells above the OS, often in mutually-incompatible ways.
To allow the user to deal with this, the following functions are
provided: parse-native-namestring and native-pathname
return the closest equivalent Lisp pathname to a given string
(appropriate for the Operating System), while native-namestring
converts a non-wild pathname designator to the equivalent native
namestring, if possible. Some Lisp pathname concepts (such as the
:back directory component) have no direct equivalents in most
Operating Systems; the behaviour of native-namestring is
unspecified if an inappropriate pathname designator is passed to it.
Convert
thinginto a pathname, using the native conventions appropriate for the pathname hosthost, or if not specified the host ofdefaults. Ifthingis a string, the parse is bounded bystartandend, and error behaviour is controlled byjunk-allowed, as withparse-namestring.