Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:24:12 -0700 | From | Jeremy Fitzhardinge <> | Subject | Re: directory sort order no longer beginning with "." and ".."? |
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David Collier-Brown wrote: > Alas, this implementation side-effect dates back to v6[1], and is so > depended upon that even CD filesystems, which are by no means Unix-like, > contain dummy "." and ".." entries[2].
Er, no, I wouldn't call '.' and '..' implementation side-effects in themselves. They're one of the particularly clever parts of the filesystem/namespace design. I would agree that the specific implementation using "link" and "unlink" was a bit of a hack, and adding proper "mkdir" and "rmdir" made the world a better place.
> I'd recommend either reproducing it or starting a project > to hunt down and kill all the programs which assume it (;-))
Well, '.' and '..' are guaranteed to be somewhere in a (linked) directory, so all filesystems are required to make sure they exist somewhere, and programs which expect them to exist are perfectly within their rights. But not necessarily the first two entries.
J
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