On Wed, 3 Jan 2007, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
High probability is all you have. Cosmic radiation hitting your
computer will more likly cause problems, than colliding 64bit inode
numbers ;)
Some of us have machines designed to cope with cosmic rays, and would be
unimpressed with a decrease in reliability.
With the suggested samefile() interface you'd get a failure with just
about 100% reliability for any application which needs to compare a
more than a few files. The fact is open files are _very_ expensive,
no wonder they are limited in various ways.
What should 'tar' do when it runs out of open files, while searching
for hardlinks? Should it just give up? Then the samefile() interface
would be _less_ reliable than the st_ino one by a significant margin.
You could do samefile() for paths --- as for races --- it doesn't matter
in this scenario, it is no more racy than stat or lstat.
Mikulas
Miklos
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