xbbs features as request

Guy Harris guy at gorodish.Sun.COM
Wed Jun 1 15:54:33 AEST 1988


> Can you say "portable"?  BSD has portable directory routines.  System V does,
> too:  but calls them by a different name.  EARLY System V and previous AT&T
> releases (and Xenix 2/3, etc.) don't have them at all.

Yes, but they can be provided; the source to the 4.1BSD version was posted to
the net about 100 years ago by Kirk McKusick, and other versions are in the
"comp.sources.unix" archives.

> I hate to say this, AT&T:  but "struct direNt" was a DUMB idea.
> Incompatibility still reigns supreme.  AAAAARGH!!!!!

1) I don't think this was AT&T's idea, I think it was POSIX's.

2) It's not such a dumb idea if you have to include <sys/dir.h> on a
   V7-filesystem version of UNIX (which defines "struct direct" as the
   16-byte format directory entry) in your program.  The only reason it was
   done was to avoid namespace collisions.



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