Fully qualified path Vs. Canonical Path.

Question

There is a canonical path concept in Java.
And there is a fully-qualified path in WinApi.

I know well what canonical path is, but I don't understand fully-qualified path's concepts.

For a file or directory, does fully-qulified path exist only one thing? -like canonical path.

Are both of them totally same concepts?

Edit:
One more thing, Is a symbloc link or a hard link belong to Fully qualified path?

Edit
I asked someone who maintains Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces page to let me know this.
And he replied me.

Is this also Fully-qualified path?
C:\directory\..\directory\file.txt

Technically that is a relative path because it contains the double dot (..) and some APIs do not process those correctly (the docs will clearly state that it needs a fully qualified path).
The two are mutually exclusive.

What he means is, in my guessing, if we put a param like this "C:\directory\..\directory\file.txt" to the function required fully-qualified path, the function never reinterpret the path and then fails.

If so, fully-qualified path is totally same with an canonical path. Isn't it.

Answer 1

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1099300/whats-the-difference-between-getpath-getabsolutepath-and-getcanonicalpath

Looks at the above question.Hopefully You will get your answer.

Answer 2

No. IMHO, fully-qualified path only lets you find the resource in unambiguous manner (independent on the current working directory, PATH environ, etc) but two different paths may identify the same resource.

I am unaware of a windows way of knowing if two paths point to the same file.