Miklos Szeredi wrote: > > The *at() thing basically gives you the advantages of a CWD without > the disadvantages. > > For example it could be useful to implement the functionality of > find(1) as a library interface. > What the *at() interfaces really do is fix/paper over a longstanding wart in Unix: the cwd really should have been a standard file descriptor (like stdin/stdout/stderr) instead of a magic piece of state maintained in kernel space. If they had been designed-in from the beginning I suspect we wouldn't have had, say, stat() and fstat(), but simply statat() -- the "normal" ones would simply be statat(stddir, path) and statat(fd, NULL) respectively. Now it isn't quite so clean. You can do some of that stuff with fchdir(), but *at() is much nicer, minus the oddball Solaris naming with random presence and absence of f- prefixes. -hpa - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
