On Tuesday 25 January 2011 18:45:15 Roland McGrath wrote:
I know of no reason to
think that the current treatment of the empty string was ever intended at
the creation of the *at interfaces.
I always assumed that this was done so that the *at syscalls can replace
both the ones that take a file descriptor (e.g. fstat) and the ones that
take a pathname (e.g. stat), which is sensible for the non-AT_FDCWD case,
although not documented in the man pages.
Treating the empty string special for AT_FDCWD is rather pointless, but
at least consistent.
Arnd