Nullpath in system calls considered harmful?
David Elliott
dce at stan.UUCP
Tue Feb 7 02:24:46 AEST 1989
In article <88368 at sun.uucp> lm at sun.UUCP (Larry McVoy) writes:
> A question for oldtimers: is there any good reason that null paths
> (ie, open("", flags)) should NOT be considered an error. If you don't
There are programs that will break, but in some cases it's just
due to sloppiness.
I ported the 4.3BSD tar to System V.3 last year, and found that it
depended on "" being a legal name. I seem to recall that the fix
in this case involved ignoring the case of the current path being
"", not changing it to "", since it was a redundant or useless
check.
I'm sorry I can't be more specific. Maybe someone at MIPS can check
the source, or maybe someone that archives comp.bugs.4bsd can look
to see if I posted the fix (sometime around last August, I think).
--
David Elliott ...!pyramid!boulder!stan!dce
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