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From: djl@winchester.UUCP (Dan Levin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: finding NFS dirs in csh?
Message-ID: <33@winchester.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 16-Dec-86 04:12:07 EST
Article-I.D.: winchest.33
Posted: Tue Dec 16 04:12:07 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 17-Dec-86 19:23:25 EST
References: <772@gcc-milo.ARPA> <565@mcgill-vision.UUCP> <10398@sun.uucp>
Lines: 22

In article <10398@sun.uucp>, guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris) writes:
> DIRECTORIES AREN'T FILES!!!!!!!!  They may happen to be implemented on UNIX
> in such a fashion that they can be treated as such in some cases, but they
> can't always be treated as such.

Here here.  You cannot expect to find UNIX semantics in a heterogeneous
environment.

Now the humorous thing is that NFS goes to great lengths to virtualize
the directory paradigm (as it clearly must), only to make the totally
unsupportable and false assumption that the server is able to return a
"cookie" that points to the "next" directory entry.  This happens to
work in UNIX, where removing a directory entry results in simply
marking the entry as free.  However, in some other systems, this is not
the case.  A counter-example is VMS, where removing a directory entry
changes the physical size of the directory, thus invalidating any
outstanding "cookies" being held by clients.
-- 
			***dan

{decwrl, glacier}!mips!djl    mips!djl@{decwrl.dec.com, glacier.stanford.edu}
It Isn't 75 degrees in New Jersey in November; I'm Glad To Be Home!