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From: new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New)
Newsgroups: comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: What constitutes a good OS?
Message-ID: <41998@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Date: 17 Jan 91 19:18:36 GMT
References: <5298@auspex.auspex.com> <41907@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <1991Jan17.004509.5435@kithrup.COM>
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In article <1991Jan17.004509.5435@kithrup.COM> sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes:
>Directories have never been plain-text files

They were plain text files in the sense that you used the same open(),read() 
and close() system calls to get a list of file names as you did to get
info out of a plain text file. Now, instead, one uses readdir, opendir, etc.
I suspect that this is one of the reasons that there are no directory-handling
routines in the K&R standard I/O library. Of course I'm aware that the system
maintains the directories for you and prevents you from writing to them. 
	 -- Darren
-- 
--- Darren New --- Grad Student --- CIS --- Univ. of Delaware ---
----- Network Protocols, Graphics, Programming Languages, 
      Formal Description Techniques (esp. Estelle), Coffee, Amigas -----
              =+=+=+ Let GROPE be an N-tuple where ... +=+=+=