finding NFS dirs in csh?

[Carl S. Gutekunst]

Gee, dare I put my foot in my mouth again? Sure, what the hey.... :-)

In article <10398 at sun.uucp> guy at sun.uucp (Guy Harris) writes:
>> NFS breaks the directory-as-a-file paradigm 
>
>DIRECTORIES AREN'T FILES!!!!!!!!  They may happen to be implemented on UNIX
>in such a fashion that they can be treated as such in some cases, but they
>can't always be treated as such.

Granted, a program that does its own directory operations is non-portable. But
why establish an artificial restriction in the kernel? And it *is* artificial;
the restriction didn't exist in SunOS 2.2, and in 3.0 a one-word adb poke was
all that was needed to permit NFS directory reads to work again.

Changes such as this unnecessarally provoke user irritation. Most users will
be patient and understanding when five-year-old code breaks because of a hard-
ware change, like adding a machine with a new architecture to the network.
They will also tolerate OS changes that provide a lot of new functionality.
But an arbitrary restriction where none existed previously is a nuisance,
especially when you've got a lot of binaries around for which you don't have
source. 

The best example of this was Interleaf, which did its own directory ops. True,
I could not run Interleaf with a Pyramid or a VAX as a server, because of the
different directory formats. But you can bet that everyone in Sun's technical
support group knew that adb poke for SunOS 3.0, for all the customers who had
Sun servers and couldn't do their desktop publishing anymore. 

In the tradition of the Unix libertarian, I say, let the developer be respon-
sible for his own stupidity or daring, such as the case may be. Don't impose
restrictions that don't absolutely need to be there.

(BTW, Interleaf 2.5 does directory calls properly.)

<csg>