What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?

[Peter da Silva]

In article <8587 at chinet.chi.il.us>, les at chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
> Besides the obvious intent of the name, there is the advantage for
> database usage that some directory operations are atomic.  That is,
> you will normally never be able to access a filename in an inconsistent
> state.  You cannot say the same for the contents of the files unless
> explicit locking is done.

I've been thinking about this statement, but it still does not make any sense.
If you do a read or write that does not span block boundaries it should be
atomic. So a binary read or write that's a power of two bytes in length should
have no problem. Certainly I don't think I've ever seen a problem with utmp.

Or with directories, for that matter... which after all are just files with
16-byte records in them (except for on BSD, and I think they still don't
cross block boundaries).
-- 
Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.

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