Followup to: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0111190419250.17210-100000@weyl.math.psu.edu>
By author: Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> Some shells (pdksh 5.2.14-1, bash 2.04 as shipped by SuSE) are trying to be
> smart if stdin is from regular file - they hope that third argument of
> lseek() is in bytes and is consistent with read() return value.
>
Not just hope... they have a legitimate reason to expect that
guarantee from anything that advertises itself as S_IFREG. I really
think procfs files should advertise themselves as S_IFCHR if they
can't fully obey the semantics of S_IFREG files (including having a
working length in stat()!)
Such S_IFCHR devices can return 0 in st_rdev to signal userspace that
this is a device node keyed by special filesystem semantics rather
than by device number.
-hpa
-- <hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private! "Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot." http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/puzzle.txt <amsp@zytor.com> - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Nov 23 2001 - 21:00:21 EST