Re: [PATCH v6 1/4] openat2: new OPENAT2_REGULAR flag support

On Mon, Apr 27, 2026 at 7:28 PM Florian Weimer [off-list ref] wrote:

* Dorjoy Chowdhury:

quoted

diff --git a/include/uapi/asm-generic/errno.h b/include/uapi/asm-generic/errno.h
index 92e7ae493ee3..bd78e69e0a43 100644
--- a/include/uapi/asm-generic/errno.h
+++ b/include/uapi/asm-generic/errno.h

@@ -122,4 +122,6 @@

 #define EHWPOISON    133     /* Memory page has hardware error */

+#define EFTYPE               134     /* Wrong file type for the intended operation */
+
 #endif

This is what POSIX says about EFTYPE, in the Rationale for System
Interfaces:

“
[EFTYPE]
    This error code was proposed in earlier proposals as "Inappropriate
    operation for file type", meaning that the operation requested is
    not appropriate for the file specified in the function call. This
    code was proposed, although the same idea was covered by [ENOTTY],
    because the connotations of the name would be misleading. It was
    pointed out that the fcntl() function uses the error code [EINVAL]
    for this notion, and hence all instances of [EFTYPE] were changed to
    this code.
”

So I'm not sure if reusing this name is a good idea.

Thanks for pointing this out. I had started out the patch series with
ENOTREGULAR and it was discussed that EFTYPE was a better and more
generic error code which is also used in BSD systems like FreeBSD[1]
and MacOS[2]. I also agree that EFTYPE makes sense. We can of course
change to something else if everyone agrees.

cc Christian Brauner who originally suggested EFTYPE for input on this.

[1]: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?errno(2)
[2]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/posixerror/eftype

Regards,
Dorjoy