replacement getwd(3).

[Paul John Falstad]

In article <ERIC.90Nov7131425 at femto.mks.com> eric at mks.com (Eric Gisin) writes:
>In article <1431 at carol.fwi.uva.nl> casper at fwi.uva.nl (Casper H.S. Dik) writes:
>   I've written a replacement getwd(3) for SunOS 4.x that returns ~user/tail
>   (with ~user expanded as in /etc/passwd) if the current directory
>   is a subdirectory of a user's home directory.
>   [The original might return: /tmp_mnt/foo/bar/bletch/usrs/casper/dir
>    the new returns /usr/casper/dir]
>   My question is: what utilities (if any) will break because of this?
>Ideally none would break, because any properly written program
>on SysV or SunOS would use getcwd(), not getwd().
>Any program that effectively does chdir(getwd()) would break
>with your getwd. ~ expansion is handled by applications,
>not libc and the kernel.

I _think_ he meant that whenever the old getwd() would return the actual
path to a users home directory, the new one will use the symbolic link
listed in /etc/passwd.  At least I infer that opinion the example he
gave.  He didn't really mean getwd would return ~ -- anyone smart enough
to write a library function like this would _probably_ be smart enough
to know that the shell expands ~.

It's probably not such a good idea to replace the library function,
though.  Applications which depend on the result of getwd() to be hard
paths free of symbolic links will break.  I don't know of any offhand
though...

--
Paul Falstad, pfalstad at phoenix.princeton.edu PLink:HYPNOS GEnie:P.FALSTAD
"Your attention, please.  Would anyone who knows where the white courtesy
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