[TUHS] Quick Question: Early Filesystems and Name/Metadata Separation?

[Leah Neukirchen via TUHS]

Dan Cross via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> writes:

> Lookups---the most common
> operation---remained simple: to retrieve the "next" entry in a
> directory, one need only add the offset from the current entry to that
> entry's position relative to the start of the directory file, but that
> was an extra step compared to what workaday programmers were used to
> doing (which was just opening the directory file read-only and, well,
> reading from it), so the `opendir`/`readdir`/`closedir` interfaces
> were added to hide this in the kernel and mimic the more traditional
> open/read/close loop.

And then we had to wait until POSIX.1-2024 until the "old" interface
became standardized (which is useful because opendir doesn't let you
specify buffer size).

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/functions/posix_getdents.html

-- 
Leah Neukirchen  <leah at vuxu.org>  https://leahneukirchen.org/