On Friday 30 May 2008 15:11:04 Beman Dawes wrote:
dizzy wrote:
Hello
If one creates a symlink like this "ln -s sym sym" (to itself symlink), bfs::exists("sym") will throw because the documentation defines it to do so (and I have nothing against it doing so, although in my programs because of this I am forced to just use "lstat()" and I can't replace using "lstat()" to check if something exists with bfs::exists).
Interesting! That's a case I never considered.
Yeah, we stumbled on it by accident as it appears one of the users of the software had such a thing :) Either way it is something very possible on probably any POSIX system.
If so, I should put it in the tracker?
Yes, please do.
Please mention what operating system you are using. I assume it is Linux, but it always helps to know for sure with filesystem issues.
I have reported it, thanks for your answer. I thought of another thing too, maybe besides "exists(path)" there should be a "symlink_exists(path)" (basically what symlink_status() is to status()), instead of doing status() as exists() does, symlink_exists() could do symlink_status() and check if a symlink OR a another file exists. Then in any code where I need to check if something exists that's possibly a symlink (that resolves correctly or not) I could use symlink_exists(). remove/remove_all are other examples that instead of exists() could use this new symlink_exists(). The only problem I see with the symlink_exists() is that the old filesystem API had something named somewhat similar that was used instead of the current "is_symlink()", I'm speaking about the deprecated "symbolic_link_exists()". For people used to it, "symlink_exists()" with different semantics might confuse them (tho it should not break existent code that still uses "symbolic_link_exists" of course). What do you think? -- Mihai RUSU Email: dizzy@roedu.net "Linux is obsolete" -- AST