Is Unix getting bloated with un-needed special cases?

[Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR/AA]

As quoted from <REARL.91Apr29125106 at nutrimat.gnu.ai.mit.edu> by rearl at gnu.ai.mit.edu (Robert Earl):
+---------------
| Was the directory mounted across NFS?  If so, file operations like
| this one on directories fail, as you pointed out.
+---------------

Way back when, a directory was just a file.  Nowadays, however, directories in
different filesystems can have extremely different formats (courtesy FSSW or
vnodes) or even not actually exist!  It's a lot easier to fail a directory
read with EISDIR than it is to have special code to generate and/or modify
directory entries to be what a program reading the directory as a file expects.

++Brandon
-- 
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