Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 20:05:25 +0100 (MET)
From: Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@linux01.gwdg.de>
To: Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>
cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, reiserfs-list@namesys.com
Subject: Re: file as a directory
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>>(Hint - "file as directory" broke a number of programs that didn't
>>expect that a file *could* be a directory, when run on a reiser4
>>filesystem...)
>
>It broke extraordinarily few.

(The fewer the better.)

That's good news, and frankly, I did not expect anything else. That's because
either programs definitely know that "it" is a file/directory because they just
mkdir'ed or so, or they implement correct error checks, e.g. the user just
created a directory and we check back (i.e. race protection).

What I am worried about is the opendir() libc call, which AFAIK does this:
  fd = open("directory", myflags | O_DIRECTORY)

OTOH, I'm not worried, because it should be the user's duty to check whether
directory really is one or not. Anything else is sloppy programming.
(Exception: taking argv[xx] from the user)


Cheers,
Jan Engelhardt
-- 
Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung
Am Fassberg, 37077 Göttingen, www.gwdg.de
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