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SubjectRe: happiness and joy w/ 2.1.47 (or problems w/ access())
Date
In article <199707270708.AAA11715@zoogx.zoology.washington.edu>,
a sun <asun@zoology.washington.edu> wrote:
>
>it looks like 2.1.47 still hasn't achieved dentry
>perfection. access("file/.", F_OK) returns 0 despite the fact that
>"file" is not a directory. even better, this only happens for root as
>far as i can tell.

No, it happens for everybody, but the file has to be executable (except
for root).

The reason is simply that the "." and ".." special cases were handled
before we even tested that it was a directory.

So with 2.1.47, do this:

touch normal_file
chmod +x normal_file
ls normal_file/..

and you'll see a directory listing of the current directory: ".." of a
file is the directory it is in ;)

You can also do

echo hello > normal_file
cat normal_file/

and you'll get "hello". This behaviour (together with the "." and ".."
handling) is actually all very orthogonal if you look at it the right
way: think of the slash as just a separator in the name space, not as a
"directory" thing, and "." and ".." as just ways to move in the name
space rather than in a "directory hierarchy".

So I could just call this a very strange feature, but I guess I'd better
not. Especially as it's very likely against various standards, POSIX
being just one of them.

The "." and ".." are truly trivial to fix (they are fixed in my current
sources, so that particular feature will be gone in 2.1.48).

The trailing slash handling is not hard, but it is made less trivial by
the fact that the rules for trailing slashes are by no means obvious -
some of the rules are totally arbitrary rules laid down by committees
(POSIX). So instead of just organizing the sources to automatically get
the trailing slashes right I will have to add silly rules for special
cases.

>also, i've been trying to track down a problem w/ a program that's
>dying on me. it's generating an exception for which i would like to
>figure out the cause. is there a way to transmogrify the exception
>address into something useful like the calling function?

Is this a kernel dump? Use "ksymoops" from linux/scripts/.

Linus

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