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000078_icon-group-sender _Wed Jun 10 08:14:31 1998.msg
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Received: from kingfisher.CS.Arizona.EDU (kingfisher.CS.Arizona.EDU [192.12.69.239])
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From: gep2@computek.net
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 09:01:52 -0500
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Subject: Re: Directory access facilities
To: icon-group@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
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> What's a recurse flag? If it's just true/false, it's no use. How do
you control whether mount points are crossed? Whether symbolic links
(aliases in MacSpeak) are followed? How cycles (possible in the
presence of aliases) are to be handled? Is the list depth first,
breadth first, or alphabetic (ascii or by locale)? What are the
arguments of the filter and what can it request? What about directories
that are known to be directories but cannot be read? What about
symbolic links whose target has disappeared?
> People could at least take a serious look at ftw()/nftw().
Other people have had three-quarter baked ideas; no need
for us to half-bake our own. nftw() exists because ftw(),
which is richer than this proposal, just plain wasn't good enough.
...and this kind of stuff is an excellent example of why so many programmers
just say "screw it!" and end up writing code that's appropriate to the OS they
have to support... for 95% of us, that's Win95/NT/DOS.
Frankly, if I have to go through all these dumb gyrations to support (in theory)
some BS that I don't have to worry about anyhow, then it's easier to just solve
the problem in some other way.
Example: I don't have to worry about aliases and file structure closed loops.
I don't care in the slightest if my program won't ever run on a Mac! Sure,
there are other markets (like Unix) but I'll gladly give those niche markets to
other people, if I can have all the rest. :-)
Hey, once you get the list, you can sort it (if you care) any way you like. IF
that matters to you.
As for the filter, the ultimate filter is to process the list elements using
string scanning (I agree with the previous poster that it would be inappropriate
to use a reg-ex style filter expression here).
What I'm concerned about is getting the basic data. Once that's done, I'm
confident I can do what I need to with it. I don't so much like the system
trying to second-guess me and trying to provide me (in advance) with every
possible variant.
Gordon Peterson
http://www.computek.net/public/gep2/
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