It seems very unlikely you'd come up with a version of this plan that we'd find acceptable in glibc. readdir does buffering, sometimes entry format conversion, and it can skip dummy entries. That's it. It's not going to become a big hairy thing with all kinds of new state. Sorry. This really is the kernel filesystem's problem. It just doesn't make sense to expect userland to implement half of your directory semantics for you. What are you going to do when you want to export a union directory to NFS? readdir is a filesystem operation. You're implementing a filesystem. Exposing DT_WHT entries may be useful as a user feature. (BSD had unions with whiteouts years ago, and their ls et al have options to let you see and operate on whiteouts explicitly so users can make sense of strange situations with unions.) But even for that, we'd have to consider the compatibility issues. Thanks, Roland -- 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
