[Info-vax] Request description of UFS for VMS person

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Bill Gunshannon <billg999 at cs.uofs.edu> wrote:
(snip on od or cat on unix directories)
 
> Current version of dd won't do it either.  Of course, you could grab the
> source to cat and write your own version that ignores it being a directory.
> Or just copy the stripped down version fromt he K&R C book.  :-)

I believe the failure is at the system call level, propagated
back through errno and perror.  Likely the programs don't know
or care that it is a directory, but just that the open fails.

>> but it's
>>    worth looking to see if this directory is on a UFS, NFS, or some
>>    other volume because it might be the file system forcing the error.
 
> I didn't look at the source, but I assume it is the utility.  Another case
> of protecting people from themselves a tthe expense of the people who really
> need the capability. (Have you ever seen what "cating" binary data to a
> terminal can do?  :-)

In the case of NFS, reading directories doesn't make much sense.
The server might have a completely differnet file system, even
one that doesn't allow directories to be read, or even where 
directories are not files.  To make this more applicable, 
consider an NFS mount off a VMS server.  What would you expect
NFS to supply on the read attempt?

-- glen