traditionally (and I'm talking about 7th edition Unix) a single
output line of 'ls' corresponded to a state obtained atomically from the
file system. I realize we can't always do that nowadays but the further we
depart from it, the worse 'ls' users will be.
The link dereferencing is a courtesy of LS, and in no way it is guaranteed to
be stable in a long run.
Not sure I get the point here. Although 7th edition Unix didn't have
symlinks, the idea that 'stat' should be atomic is valid even in the
presence of symlinks.
Is your point that 'stat', which follows symlinks, might give results
that don't correspond to any state of the filesystem at any time in the
past? If so, I'm not sure I agree (at least for filesystems that do
things atomically as POSIX requires); if not, then I am not
understanding the point.
--
Problem reports: https://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ: https://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation: https://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info: https://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
