[Info-vax] Looking into C-include files on VMS

[Joerg Schilling]

In article <fb6670fc-aac0-4d28-abf1-e7c3c51fcddc at n35g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
Steven Schweda  <sms.antinode at gmail.com> wrote:
>John E. Malmberg wrote:
>
>> [...]
>> As long as you are doing an update:
>>
>> mkiosf is assuming that the host system has the "." and ".." special
>> directories and exits with an error if they are not present.
>> [...]
>
>   As usual, a _useful_ problem report would include data like
>the program version, its origin, and how it was used.  The
>notes in my latest kit, for example, say:

It seems that he misinterprets the POSIX standard.

-	POSIX does not require that a readdir() operation will return 
	entries for "." and "..".

-	POSIX however requires that "." and ".." are "understood" by the 
	filesystem in case that there are no explicit entries for "." and
	".." in the directories of that filesystem.

-	The ISO 9660 standard definitely does require directory entries
	for "." and "..". ISO 9660 defines the name to be used internally
	for "." to be the NULL character with the file name length set to 1.
	ISO 9660 defines the name to be used internally for ".." to be
	the character '\001' (CONTROL-A) with the file name length set to 1.

Cleanly written software usually skips the entries for "." and ".." in case 
they apear as a return from readdir(). Mkisofs was not clean in former times 
but has been fixed for this problem a long time ago (IIRC in August 2006).

-- 
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