Re: directory sort order no longer beginning with "." and ".."?

[David Collier-Brown]

Ray Lee wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 7:53 AM, Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx> 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@xxxxxxx                 |                      -- Mark Twain
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