Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Wed, 6 Aug 1997 16:23:08 -0700 (PDT) | | From | Darin Johnson <> | | Subject | Re: rmdir(".") works, and causes havoc |
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John Kodis writes: > On Mon, Aug 04, 1997 at 09:23:24AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > Sad, because it _could_ be potentially useful, it's just not allowed in > > POSIX. > > You could follow the precident set by the FSF. Allow the new enhanced > behavior by default, but provide a switch, ... > To force the POSIX-mandated brain-damage.
POSIX is not necessarily brain damaged here. It may appear so from a narrow Linux-only view though. It probably would have been better if POSIX actually left this point open, and said the behavior was system dependent. If there is any POSIX brain damage, it's from being allowed to delete a directory that a process is using.
But given that POSIX did make a choice, the way they went seems more system independent to me (not all POSIX systems are UNIX, and ".", ".." might only be logical entities). I sometimes get the impression that many many people assume standards committees make stuff up randomly without thinking about them, thus terms like "brain damage" are used instead of polite disagreement.
It's also important to note that there might be programs that depend upon the POSIX defined behavior, and they could end up deleting the wrong things just because someone has declared something as POSIX brain damage. Traditional UNIX behavior and POSIX behavior are not suddenly rendered moot just because one particular kernel has no particular technical reason to follow that behavior.
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