>From source inspection, Net and Free appear to allow read(2) of dirs to succeed. However, since Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris have the EISDIR behavior I think it is probably safe from a portability standpoint.
We're long past the days when opendir(3)/readdir(3) used read(2)... HP-UX and AIX still allow reads of directories but no one cares about them ;-) - todd