[talk] Why do directories not contain data?
Thomas Levine
_ at thomaslevine.com
Mon Jun 27 00:50:06 EDT 2016
In every system I have used (not very many systems), if I write(2) to a
directory and read(2) from it, I either get errors or an empty result;
why are these calls not supported for directories?
The directory of course contains references to its children, but that's
not the information I'm thinking about accessing; I naively think that a
directory should be able to contain both a list of children (that I can
display with ls) and an arbitrary blob of unrelated data (that I can
display with cat); why I have never seen a system that works like this?
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