Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!boulder!stan!dce
From: dce@stan.UUCP (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Nullpath in system calls considered harmful?
Message-ID: <421@salgado.stan.UUCP>
Date: 6 Feb 89 16:24:46 GMT
References: <88368@sun.uucp> <613@uva.UUCP> <88458@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: dce@salgado.UUCP (David Elliott)
Organization: Solbourne Computer Inc., Longmont, Colorado
Lines: 19

In article <88368@sun.uucp> lm@sun.UUCP (Larry McVoy) writes:
>	A question for oldtimers: is there any good reason that null paths
>    (ie, open("", flags)) should NOT be considered an error.  If you don't

There are programs that will break, but in some cases it's just
due to sloppiness.

I ported the 4.3BSD tar to System V.3 last year, and found that it
depended on "" being a legal name.  I seem to recall that the fix
in this case involved ignoring the case of the current path being
"", not changing it to "", since it was a redundant or useless
check.

I'm sorry I can't be more specific.  Maybe someone at MIPS can check
the source, or maybe someone that archives comp.bugs.4bsd can look
to see if I posted the fix (sometime around last August, I think).

-- 
David Elliott		...!pyramid!boulder!stan!dce