Re: file as a directory

[Jan Engelhardt]

>Following the recent discussions on the lists on "file as directory", I
[...]

Recently I discovered that calling "joe /etc" on FreeBSD opens the directory 
itself (rather than erroring out with EISDIR). The byte string looked like a 
number of "struct dirent"s. Did it break apps in BSD? I donot think so.

(Hell, I just voted _for_ the directory-as-a-file and vice-versa stuff, I'm 
never gonna regret it to myself :)

>would automatically give you the glued file (without having to add the
>.glued !) and when you access it as a directory (using readdir(), for
>instance), you would get the components listed as a directory.
>(I am not sure whether the access method, e.g. read() vs. readdir() is
>sufficient to distinguish the meaning. Another way may be putting a "/"
>after the objectname to indicate that you want it as a directory.)

I would not rely on that. Many apps strip a trailing slash (just to add it 
later again) or vice versa!

>If we do this, the applications don't need to know whether they are
>dealing with an object consisting of small files, aggregated, or whether
>they are looking at a big file with some way of accessing their parts.
>If an old application (or user) looks for the /etc/passwd file, it will
>still get what it expects without having to know that the file is an
>aggregate.

What will ls do? Consider this on a "normal" filesystem:

ls -l /etc/passwd
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 1614 Dec 12 23:57 /etc/passwd
ls -l /etc
[lots of files]


What will happen on v4 then?
ls -l /etc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 123456 Dec 01 23:45 /etc
ls -l /etc/passwd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1234 Dec 01 23:45 root
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1234 Dec 01 23:45 jengelh
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1234 Dec 01 23:45 daemon
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1234 Dec 01 23:45 sys
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1234 Dec 01 23:45 stduser

It's because "ls" checks the type of the argument to decide what to do (unless
you add -d).


Jan Engelhardt
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