(Because I'm so sick of the broken autoresponders bugtraq is full of, I've set the From: on this mail to a black-hole address. Please use the address in the signature if you actually want to reach me.) >> Before a chdir to "foo", take stock: >> - record stat("."); DOTFD = open("."); (get a fd to ".") This is not possible if . is a search-only directory. (While find will not work very well in such a directory, care should be taken that it not fall over just because someone happened to chmod the read bits away from a directory just when find happens to be in it.) More generally, I've wanted to do this - use file descriptors as handles onto directories - and often wished for an O_NOACCESS mode to open() in consequence. > Of course, open(2) will follow a symlink, if the directory we > originally stat()ed is replaced by a symlink just before we issue the > open() call. We of course can guard against that by issuing an > lstat() on the fd once we have opened it. ITYPM fstat(), not lstat(), in the last line. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B