Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:11:12 -0400
From: David Collier-Brown <davecb@sun.com>
Subject: Re: directory sort order no longer beginning with "." and ".."?
In-reply-to: <2c0942db0807290935s67eba63te5bb826a0ab7c752@mail.gmail.com>
To: Ray Lee <ray-lk@madrabbit.org>
Cc: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>, Oliver.Soltys@rsel.renesas.com,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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Ray Lee wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 7:53 AM, Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org> wrote:
> 
>>Oliver Soltys wrote:
>>
>>>My question: is this a bug, or a feature? I could not find anything about
>>>that
>>>anywhere...
>>>
>>>Does anybody have an idea, how I can fix this? Unfortunately, our
>>>application
>>>can not be changed.
>>
>>No Unix-like system makes any guarantee about the order of '.' and '..' with
>>respect to other directory entries.  They've often appeared first as an
>>implementation side-effect, but that's highly system and filesystem
>>dependent.

 Alas, this implementation side-effect dates back to v6[1], and is so
depended upon that even  CD filesystems, which are by no means Unix-like,
contain dummy "." and ".." entries[2].

  I'd recommend either reproducing it or starting a project
to hunt down and kill all the programs which assume it (;-))

--dave
[1. I helped on the DPS-6 upgrade from v6 to v7, and it was a (dis)feature then]
[2. Andy Tannenbaum "Modern Operating Systems", 2nd Edition]

> That's a good idea, though based on his description it's even easier.
> The LD_PRELOAD just needs to artificially introduce . and .., at the
> beginning and toss them out once it hits them in the list. No sorting
> required.
-- 
David Collier-Brown            | Always do right. This will gratify
Sun Microsystems, Toronto      | some people and astonish the rest
davecb@sun.com                 |                      -- Mark Twain
(905) 943-1983, cell: (647) 833-9377, (800) 555-9786 x56583
bridge: (877) 385-4099 code: 506 9191#
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