On 2010-05-03, Baz Walter <baz...@ftml.net> wrote: > On 03/05/10 19:12, Grant Edwards wrote:
>>> i think they should always either both succeed, or both fail. >> >> That's not how Unix filesystems work. >> >> Are you saying that Python should add code to it's open() builtin >> which calls realpath() and then refuses to open files for which >> realpath() fails? > > my original question was really about *how* python does the > "seemingly impossible". i had hoped there might be a way to augment > realpath so that it would always work for any path which is openable. > but apparently that is not possible for unix filesystems. Exactly >> Even though the user provided a legal and openable path? > > that sounds like an operational definition to me: what's the > difference between "legal" and "openable"? Legal as in meets the syntactic requirements for a path (not sure if there really are any requirements other than it being a null-terminated string). Openable meaning that it denotes a path file that exists and for which the caller has read permissions on the file and execute premissions on the directories within the path. -- Grant -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list