Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: ansi c and directories
Message-ID: <1989Nov25.235650.2897@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <13295@s.ms.uky.edu> <1848@ntmtka.mn.org> <11681@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: Sat, 25 Nov 89 23:56:50 GMT

In article <11681@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>Although I have reasonable, standard functions for accessing
>directories, I find that it is quite rare for programs to use them.
>The main reason for this seems to be that pathnames are generally
>provided as arguments to programs, so they have no need to rummage
>around in directories...

As an example of this, consider C News.  This is a non-trivial software
package with a lot of different functions.  Our informal early releases
included Doug's directory routines.  We left them out of the production
release, because nothing ever used them.

(Actually, there is now one optional program that uses directory functions.
It's a speeded-up version of something we also supply as a shell file.)
-- 
That's not a joke, that's      |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
NASA.  -Nick Szabo             | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu