Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1758558AbYG2RYf (ORCPT ); Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:24:35 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1757381AbYG2RYS (ORCPT ); Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:24:18 -0400 Received: from gw.goop.org ([64.81.55.164]:57337 "EHLO mail.goop.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757296AbYG2RYR (ORCPT ); Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:24:17 -0400 Message-ID: <488F523C.7090201@goop.org> Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:24:12 -0700 From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (X11/20080501) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: davecb@sun.com CC: Ray Lee , Oliver.Soltys@rsel.renesas.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: directory sort order no longer beginning with "." and ".."? References: <488EE7BF.4020908@rsel.renesas.com> <488F2EDA.2090709@goop.org> <2c0942db0807290935s67eba63te5bb826a0ab7c752@mail.gmail.com> <488F4F30.1070903@sun.com> In-Reply-To: <488F4F30.1070903@sun.com> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.95.6 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1188 Lines: 25 David Collier-Brown wrote: > 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]. Er, no, I wouldn't call '.' and '..' implementation side-effects in themselves. They're one of the particularly clever parts of the filesystem/namespace design. I would agree that the specific implementation using "link" and "unlink" was a bit of a hack, and adding proper "mkdir" and "rmdir" made the world a better place. > I'd recommend either reproducing it or starting a project > to hunt down and kill all the programs which assume it (;-)) Well, '.' and '..' are guaranteed to be somewhere in a (linked) directory, so all filesystems are required to make sure they exist somewhere, and programs which expect them to exist are perfectly within their rights. But not necessarily the first two entries. J -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/