Hello Justin,
Well, the following comment says "ignore anything but regular files",
so I'm supposing that that is the behavior that we actually want here
and failed to implement correctly. There might be scope for
additional directory-reading functions, but I'd think you'd want
more information (such as the file type) returned from anything
that doesn't act this way.
Maybe pg_stat_file() deserves similar attention ? Right now, it'll fail on a
broken link. If we changed it to lstat(), then it'd work, but it'd also show
metadata for the *link* rather than its target.
Yep. I think this traditional answer is the rational answer.
As I wrote about an earlier version of the patch, ISTM that instead of
reinventing, extending, adapting various ls variants (with/without
metadata, which show only files, which shows target of links, which shows
directory, etc.) we would just need *one* postgres "ls" implementation
which would be like "ls -la arg" (returns file type, dates), and then
everything else is a wrapper around that with appropriate filtering that
can be done at the SQL level, like you started with recurse.
It would reduce the amount of C code and I find the SQL-level approach
quite elegant.
--
Fabien.
