Casper.Dik@xxxxxxx wrote: ... >Had they done so, we would never have had to use readdir_r() and progammers >would not have introduced bugs in the (mis)use of pathconf, over allocating, >etc. > >I would be interested in seeing any real-world use of readdir_r() in >a context where readdir_r() is required (multiple threads reading from >a single DIR *). > > Consider the following situation(I'm not sure if anyone actually does this): 1) You have a "spool" directory containing a large number of files, each which represents a task to process. 2) You have a number of worker threads. Each worker thread reads a file from the global DIR*, and then opens and reads the file for processing(and then loops on 2). Of course, you could always just put a mutex around every call to readdir(), and copy the filename somewhere safe, or you could invent a signalling system to ask one thread to do all the readdir()s. Whether this makes sense depends on how much of readdir_r has to be spent inside a global mutex/spinlock anyway, and how long the processing part takes compared with the readdir() part. Andrew
