What is atomic about having dd do this? open() with O_DIRECTORY to test
for existence of a directory is exactly what test does isn't it? If
your goal is to test for the existence of a directory then test is what
you want to use, not dd. The purpose of dd is to copy/convert data
between devices, not test if files or directories exist, so I don't
think this patch is very appropriate.
Paul Eggert wrote:
You can open a directory without writing to it. Something like this:
$ mkdir foo
$ dd if=foo iflag=directory count=0
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 2e-05 seconds, 0 B/s
You can think of this as a way to do a "test -d foo && test -r foo"
atomically, without race conditions. Admittedly this is somewhat
twisted, but the new documentation does say that iflag=directory is of
"limited utility"....
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