descriptors vs pathnames (was Re: getcwd() and friends.)

[Peter da Silva]

In article <4457 at psuvax1.cs.psu.edu>, schwartz at shire.cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) writes:
> By the way, lest things become confused, what Felix Lee and I are
> proposing (at this point) is to add two new flags to open, and some
> new syscalls.  The flags are O_EXEC, which opens for execution (used
> with fexec, fchdir), and O_OPEN, which opens for nothing in particular
> (used with fchmod, fchown).

Why do you need an O_EXEC? I can see it would be desirable to know that
you can exec the file you have O_OPENned, but it's not necessary. It also
complicated the design. Why not have an O_CHOWN (only succeeds if owner or
superuser), O_CHMOD, etc...?

O_OPEN by itself will serve.
-- 
Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.

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