How hard can this be? (Was: POSIX bashing)

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <MEISSNER.91Apr15215423 at curley.osf.org> meissner at osf.org (Michael Meissner) writes:
>In article <111 at imsdx3.UUCP> chris at imsdx3.UUCP (Chris Ott) writes:
>|   1) Symbolic links. C'mon guys, how hard can this be to implement?
>I was working with a UNIX vendor that did this, and it was painful to
>get all of the commands modified to support symlinks correctly.

Yes, I did this too (BRL UNIX System V emulation for 4.nBSD), and not
only was there a fairly large amount of work, but also in many cases
it is simply not clear what "correct" behavior should be.  One problem
with symlinks is that sometimes you want to see them and sometimes you
want them to be transparent, and no single choice is correct for all
situations.

>|   2) Reasonably long filenames. ...
>Again, you have to go through the commands.

I do hope that by now the standard AT&T UNIX distribution has had all
the utilities converted to use <dirent.h>.  (Yes, the conversion was a
lot of work.)