The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop [LWN.net]

The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop

Posted Mar 22, 2007 18:48 UTC (Thu) by thedevil (subscriber, #32913)
Parent article: The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop

>>Ted Ts'o suggested that someone should try to go through committee to get telldir/seekdir/readdir fixed or eliminated<<

So, if committee (POSIX I suppose) goes along with that, how are we going to scan directories?

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The 2007 Linux Storage and File Systems Workshop

Posted Mar 23, 2007 16:26 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I can't see how you can eliminate opendir()/readdir(), but telldir() and
the wierdness around it could be zapped quite easily.

Outside of scripting language interfaces, the Linux kernel itself, and
glibc, I see hardly any uses of telldir() on a modern Linux box (Ruby,
Perl &c scripts aren't likely to depend on the detailed semantics of
telldir() anyway because non-POSIX systems don't implement them). The
Midnight Commander VFS implements a telldir operation but never appears to
call it...

... in fact, on my system here, I have no actual *uses* of telldir() at
all. Even strfry() is called more often.

I'd say telldir()'s semantics could be changed pretty easily. Something
like it might remain potentially useful, but its (extremely annoying to
implement) current semantics don't seem to matter to most real code.