On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 10:54:43AM +0000, Pádraig Brady wrote: > Sorry I sent the following to the list only. > Please cc coreutils@gnu.org on any responses... > > On 11/02/2020 10:45, Colin Watson wrote: > > If the current directory has been removed, then "ls" confusingly > > produced no output and no error message, indistinguishable from the case > > of running on an empty directory. It makes more sense to report ENOENT > > in this case. > > I don't think this is a general solution as the opendir() spec states: > https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/opendir.html > "The directory entries for dot and dot-dot are optional". > I've also seen reference to FUSE file systems that don't provide those > entries.
Ah. Fair point; that is unfortunate. I do think this is a confusing problem and worth trying to solve, though. The only other idea I have is, if there are no entries in the directory, to fstat the directory fd and see if st_nlink == 0; if so, issue a warning message, perhaps more like "directory may have been removed" than "no such file or directory". There are probably still FUSE-like situations where that goes wrong, but IIRC naïve FUSE implementations tend to set st_nlink to 1 rather than 0. Might something like that be acceptable? -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org]
