In article <20050909122609.GA2392@britannica.bec.de>,
Joerg Sonnenberger  <joerg@britannica.bec.de> wrote:
>On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 05:50:48PM +0200, Julio M. Merino Vidal wrote:
>> So the question is...  are the cookies used in all kinds of reads?
>> Or maybe they aren't, butl the system know where to restart a
>> readdir operation in some other way?  If so, I will simply get rid
>> of my custom variables.
>
>The cookies just store the "offset" for each entry, not only the last as
>would be returned to userland. It is not used by anything but NFS. On
>the other hand, if there was a bug in the handling of seeking, it would
>be exposed by normal readdir as well.

They are also used by the emulations (and compat code).

christos