Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!husc6!bu-cs!buengc!bph
From: bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Dot files always first in directory?
Message-ID: <2778@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 5 May 89 10:13:37 GMT
References: <11108@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <3540@udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU>
Reply-To: bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton)
Followup-To: comp.unix.wizards
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 21

In article <3540@udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU> conan@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Robert B Carroll) writes:
>In article <11108@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) writes:
>>It it safe to assume when writing a program which manipulates
>>directories that . and .. will always be the first two entries in a
>>directory?
>
>NO, its not save to assume that.
>try "touch #abcd" then 'list' the directory.

To beat this horse quite dead, any leading character that would sort before
the period will place the filename before the . and .. in a directory
listing.  The ascii characters that will do this are space, !, ", #, $, %,
&, ', (, ), *, +, ,, and -.  I haven't tried it, but I bet you can get the
nonprinting ascii characters to do it too.  There are 32 of those.

I've actually had the fun ( yeah, right %-) ) task of trying to remove a
file called * from a directory.  It's easy, _once_you_know_how_...

				--Blair
				  "...and now, with this set of
				   Time/Life books..."