Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I don't know the most recent, but it's probably been awhile since it was usable.

The first UNIX I programmed on (SVR2, circa 85-86) still worked that way (no opendir/readdir) since it had the classic V7 filesystem. Each directory entry was just a fixed-size 16 byte chunk; 2 bytes for the inode number and 14 for the filename.

Of course, this meant a limitation of 64K files per filesystem -- that was still OK for us (40MB would be a large disk) but was already would have caused problems for bigger servers. It also was the cause of the "classic" UNIX 14-character filename limit.

By that time BSD4.2's FFS filesystem had already removed both of these limits (which I assume is when opendir() and friends arrived) According to wikipedia that made it to the AT&T world by SVR4 in the late 80s, which sounds correct.

As someone else mentioned some UNIXes may still let you open() a directory. However, since we're long past the days of there being just one "UNIX filesystem" it would be impossible to interpret its contents in a portable manner.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: