General. The canonical form of a name is its complete, standard, and unambiguous form. InterSystems IRIS has canonical forms for various entities, including numbers, global references, command options, files and paths, and devices.

For information on the canonical form of numbers, see $NUMBER.

For information on the canonical form of globals and the related naked global references, see Naked Global References or the $NAME or $ZREFERENCE reference pages.

Information on the canonical form of command options appears on the reference page for the command itself.

The canonical form of files, paths, and devices depends on the operating system.

For example, on Windows, a reference to the file ..\iris.wij is not in canonical form, while C:\InterSystems\MyIRIS\IRIS.WIJ is (if there is an instance of InterSystems IRIS called MyIRIS and installed in the standard location).

For UNIX®, an example of the canonical form of a device name is /dev/tty.