Re: file as a directory

[Jan Engelhardt]

>I don't imagine anyone would miss that behaviour, we can probably have
>something more useful than a
>cat: /etc: Is a directory
>message.

But if /etc can also be a file, cat would not complain!

>ok, I don't really care about the trailing slash. The reading method
>(read() vs. readdir()) may be enough to distinguish the uses. The
>trailing / is still a useful (and logical) visual notation though for
>the different meanings, so something like ls could give both versions.

Yes, indeed the idea itself is good. `ls` uses it to follow symlinks that 
point to directories:

ls -l /U
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 35 Dec  6 22:03 /U -> 
/media/usb-0000000000004287:0:0:0p

ls -l /U/
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  48 Dec  6 14:27 .
drwxr-xr-x  31 root root 824 Dec 14 17:51 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 1614 Dec 12 23:57 tstpasswd

>> What will ls do? 
>list both /etc/passwd and /etc/passwd/ perhaps?

Well, and before ls is tweaked to do so?



Jan Engelhardt
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