Re: [BUG] Generic syscalls -- chmod vs. fchmodat

On Tuesday, January 25, 2011 13:21:14 Arnd Bergmann wrote:

On Tuesday 25 January 2011 18:45:15 Roland McGrath wrote:

quoted

 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.

i dont know if the gnulib peeps are on these lists, but i think their 
implementations of some of the *at funcs leverage the extended behavior that 
is available under Linux.  or at least, i'm certain they'll have some insight 
into some of these nuances.
-mike