Bruno Haible wrote: >> ... as part of my campaign to put GNU tar on a file descriptor diet ... > > Can you please say a few words about what it means, and what is the > motivation? > > File descriptors are a central concept in POSIX. Is something wrong with it? > > To which class of programs does this diet apply? To all programs? Or only > to those that spawn subprocesses? Or only to those that use fork() without > exec()?
He means merely that when tar traverses a tree of depth N it will no longer require N open file descriptors.
