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

[Bob Eager]

On Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:39:22 UTC, G Cornelius 
<cornelius at eisner.decus.invalid> wrote:

> Bob Eager wrote:
> > On Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:24:18 UTC, billg999 at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon)
> > wrote:
> 
> >>>Hmmm....my FreeBSD systems allow one to 'cat' a directory, as I would 
> >>>expect.
> 
> >>What version?  Mine did in the past but I just tried it and it failed
> >>on a directory.  I run mostly FreeBSD here.  No Solaris currently in
> >>operation.  Not even at home.
> 
> > 6.3 on this one. Also tried 6.4. Don't have a 7.x system handy.
> 
> [...]
> 
> Output on a Linux system (Debian 'Sarge', ext3 fs), using
> a trivial getc()/putc() program to copy a binary file:
> 
>  bash$ kernelversion
>  2.6
>  bash$
>  bash$ ./copfile mydir junk.bin
>  Error from getc(): Is a directory
>  Completion status from getc() 0xffffffff errno 21
>  Nonzero ferror(infile): 1
> 
> It would appear to be inherent in the I/O systems / RTL's
> these days.

My test program didn't attempt to copy anything - it is sufficient to 
try and open the file/directory.

It isn't the C RTL in my case because I used the open() system call, 
rather than fopen(), specifically to exclude that. The check is either 
in the kernel (most likely) or in the glue code for open() (highly 
unlikely).
-- 
Bob Eager