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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: /bin/test and stat(2)
Message-ID: <6532@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 7-Oct-87 22:17:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.6532
Posted: Wed Oct  7 22:17:21 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 10-Oct-87 12:50:13 EDT
References: <9479@brl-adm.ARPA> <29056@sun.uucp> <15069@topaz.rutgers.edu> <1036@basser.oz>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 12

In article <1036@basser.oz> boyd@basser.oz (Boyd Roberts) writes:
>I see ``.'' in every directory.

You haven't looked at enough directories, then, particularly using
distributed network file systems.  On such a system, an "ls" of
a directory may not show a "." entry, but you can nonetheless
open the current working directory via open(".",0).  One could
argue for accepting open("",0) the same way, and in fact older
UNIXes did.  However, somewhere along the way somebody decided
that such usage would more probably be a programmer error than
intentional, and removed support for it (at least in recent UNIX
System V implementations).