Re: updated msdos patch for 2.1.72

Bill Hawes (whawes@star.net)
Fri, 12 Dec 1997 09:31:58 -0500


Horst von Brand wrote:
>
> Bill Hawes <whawes@star.net> said:
> > In addition to preserving error semantics, leaving the negative dentry
> > in place will speed up operations if for some reason the invalid name is
> > used a lot. This might be the case with certain wild-card names like
> > *.bak or whatever.
>
> What happens if somebody creates xyz.bak after creating the negative
> dentry? I think situations like this argue against "wildcard" dentries.

There's no wildcarding in the dentry namespace -- all names are treated
as an ordinary string. In the case of msdos fs the name xyz.bak is
valid, so it will be converted according to the normal rules.

The only reason for creating a *.bak dentry is so that the fs entry
points can be called to return a specific error code (ENOENT or EINVAL).
The dentry will always remain negative (no inode), so it will save time
if repeated lookups are performed.

Regards,
Bill