ansi c and directories

[Wayne Beech]

I think some people missed the point of my letter since the only 
responses i have gotten back have been on the order of "but not all
operating systems have hierarchal file systems".  this was my original
letter:

 > Does anyone know the rationale behind not specifically defining a set of
 > functions to work with directories in ansi C; things like opendir(),
 > next_dir_entry(), isdir(), etc.  if you are writing a program that works
 > with directories that is expected to run on unix and non-unix machines how
 > do you handle this? with a bunch of #ifdef UNIX #elif SOMEOTHERMACHINE ....?

the names i made up were just examples.....if you were on a system such as
cms then isdir() would be easy to write since it would also return FALSE.
what i was getting at was most programs perform their work on files so it
looks like there would have been something mentioned in the standard about
handling routine actions on file systems, things like how do you get the
names of files in a directory( or on a minidisk).
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