Re: If not readdir() then what?

[Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>]

On Sunday April 8, joern@lazybastard.org wrote:
> On Sun, 8 April 2007 11:11:20 -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> > 
> > Well, the question is if you can keep the seekdir/telldir cookie around 
> > as a pointer -- preferrably in userspace, of course.  You would 
> > presumably garbage-collect them on closedir() -- there is no other point 
> > at which you could.
> 
> Garbage-collecting them on closedir() does not work.  It surprised me as
> well, but there seem to be applications that keep the telldir() cookie
> around after closedir().  Iirc, "rm -r" was one of them.
> 
> Neil, is this correct?

It's just NFS.  nfsd does open/getdents/close on every readdir
request.
"rm -r" is the application that tends to detect any problems with
cookie handling between the NFS client and server.

(I'm sure there was once an 'rm -r' that used telldir/seekdir, but I
cannot find it.  Maybe it was level-7 UNIX :-)

NeilBrown
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