On Thu, 3 Feb 2011 20:49:17 -0500 erik quanstrom <quans...@quanstro.net> wrote:
> > FreeBSD 8.0 lets you cat the raw data of a directory, and I would > > expect the other free BSDs to have that misfeature, too. > > i don't see how allowing this is a misfeature. regardless, > plan 9 allows it. > > ; sha1sum < /adm/timezone > 05d16cd216a58fae746ae36f72c784d10bcc1392 It felt like a misfeature every time I dumped raw directory entries to my terminal, and I didn't think of a good use like your example. This feature might be more useful if the directory entries were presented to clients of the FS in a textual format, but that would encourage, if not require, far more parsing in the system, and that is bad both for performance and for security. Robert Ransom
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