Re: If not readdir() then what?

On Sun, 8 April 2007 21:44:26 -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:

Well, Joern thought that rm -rf might relying on the telldir cookie
being valid in precisely that circumstance. If that is true, I'd
argue that this is a BUG in GNU coreutils that should be fixed...

I heard it and accepted that claim without checking it. Might have been
a mistake. But the claim came from an NFS developer, which may explain
a thing or two.

NFS clients have to deal with a server rebooting underneith them and
should still behave as expected. An "rm -r" running on the client
concurrently to a rebooting server is a problem indeed and could be
solved with seekdir/telldir.

That surely doesn't make life any easier for filesystem developers, I
agree. From that point of view, all telldir cookies should end their
life at closedir time. For "rm -r" it would be sufficient if the nfs
client simply didn't seekdir at all. For "ls -lR", this would return
duplicate dentries.

Jörn

--
My second remark is that our intellectual powers are rather geared to
master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes
evolving in time are relatively poorly developed.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
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