Wheeler: Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames [LWN.net]

Wheeler: Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames

Posted Mar 28, 2009 11:04 UTC (Sat) by magnus (subscriber, #34778)
Parent article: Wheeler: Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames

In my opinion, the problems described are not caused by which characters are allowed in filenames, but by the fragile process of converting file references to text strings and back again. This creates other types of problems as well, subtle race conditions and such.

There ought to be a different way of passing file references between programs and from programs to the kernel in a way that conversion from text to file reference is only ever needed on hand written file names.

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Wheeler: Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames

Posted Mar 31, 2009 5:14 UTC (Tue) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]

We have that -- that's what file descriptors are. It would be nice if programs passed them back and forth more often, but my guess is that they mostly get used where they should, and to make their use more ubiquitous you'd need to radically re-architect a lot of stuff. (If one wanted to be provocative, one could claim that the whole goal of EROS/Coyotos is to figure out what that re-architecting looks like.)