Re: [boost] Assorted filesystem improvements

From: Walter Landry (wlandry_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-10-31 23:14:43

Walter Landry <wlandry_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Beman Dawes <bdawes_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> > At 06:16 AM 9/18/2003, Walter Landry wrote:
> > 
> >  >I have attached patches for a few assorted improvements to the
> >  >filesystem library.  These patches are only to the posix side of
> >  >things.  I wouldn't know the first thing of what to do on Windows.
> > 
> > It may be a few days before I get a chance to look at these, but I will get 
> > back to you on them.
> 
> I haven't heard anything, but here is another patch.  If you are
> checking for whether a path exists, you should use lstat instead of
> stat.  Otherwise, with the library as written, you can never delete a
> symlink that points to nowhere.

I still haven't heard anything, but I found another problem with
symlinks.  Consider the directory structure

  foo
  foo/bar
  foo/bar/baz
  foo/bar/baz/bat
  foo/frob --> bar/baz/

where the last directory is a symlink.  If I am sitting in foo and type

  $ ls frob/../baz

I get

  bat/

However, the filesystem library wants to shorten this into just "baz".
This, of course, is incorrect.  So it seems like you should never
attempt to shorten a path by removing any instances of "../".  Rather,
boost::filesystem can provide methods to get the fully canonical name
of a path.  I don't know about Windows, but this seems to map more
closely with Unix semantics.  Agree?  Disagree?

Looking for feedback.

Walter Landry
wlandry_at_[hidden]