Usenet 1994 January/usenetsourcesnewsgroupsinfomagicjanuary1994.iso/sources/std_unix/volume.27/text0045.txt

Text File | 1992-05-20 | 1.4 KB | 27 lines

Submitted-by: [e-mail] (Doug Gwyn)

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] ("Brian R. Haug") writes:
>A co-worker suggested that perhaps the real problem is that rewinddir and
>seekdir are of type void and should have some other type so that they may
>return an error condition (like the one I'm having to deal with).

I agree that it was unfortunate, but it wouldn't solve the REAL problem
(from the point of view of the application program), which is that the
rewinddir() fails under perfectly ordinary usage.  As I recall the P1003
discussions, the opinion was generally held that if opendir() succeeded,
then a subsequent rewinddir() couldn't possibly fail (except if the
filesystem went off line or something of the sort, which we weren't
particularly concerned about at the time).  seekdir(), on the other hand,
was expected to malfunction using any reasonable user-mode implementation,
on certain systems that dynamically compact directories.  (Of course they
would also affect readdir(), but only in the sense of causing some entries
to be skipped.  Really, the file-system part of the operating system should
provide more reliable directory access facilities than UNIX typically does.)

My honest suggestion is to get the /dev/fd filesystem maintainer to support
seeking to BOF at least, if not providing seek in its full generality.


Volume-Number: Volume 27, Number 45