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SubjectRe: directory sort order no longer beginning with "." and ".."?
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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