telldir/seekdir
telldir/seekdir
Posted Nov 18, 2010 16:36 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648)In reply to: Ghosts of Unix past, part 3: Unfixable designs by Yorick
Parent article: Ghosts of Unix past, part 3: Unfixable designs
Just curious, why do you consider telldir()/seekdir() to be "unspeakable horrors"? Their interfaces are simple and straightforward, and even their manual pages are easy to read/understand.
Posted Nov 18, 2010 17:19 UTC (Thu)
by foom (subscriber, #14868)
[Link] (1 responses)
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!
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.
telldir/seekdir
telldir/seekdir