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telldir/seekdirtelldir/seekdirPosted Nov 18, 2010 17:19 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868)In reply to: telldir/seekdir by pr1268 Parent article: Ghosts of Unix past, part 3: Unfixable designs
Because of the requirements they impose on filesystem implementations: what happens when you add/delete files from the directory you have open. And with a saved position from "telldir"? How can you stuff enough information into a "long" to allow a stable iteration position in the face of concurrent modification of the directory contents? It's just a pain in the ass to implement.
And it's so tricky and so unused, that the implementation was actually horribly broken from its inception in BSD until 2008, 25 years later!
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telldir/seekdir Posted Nov 18, 2010 17:31 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Ahh yes, I almost forgot about those cases. In fact, there was some discussion here on LWN about the difficulties of these in the context of UnionFS. Thanks for jogging my memory.
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