[ On Sat, October 29, 1994 at 00:05:53 (GMT), Christos Zoulas wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Little prob with rm
>
> This is not exactly true. Namei() was changed in SVR4 and other posix
> machines (and semi posix machines including sunos >= 4.1.3) 
> to ignore any number of trailing slashes. This is not a great
> thing. Consider:
> 
> 	% rm -fr foo
> 	% cat > foo/
> 	bar baz
> 	^D
> 	% echo */

Regardless of what namei() is doing, it is not the "problem" on
NetBSD-1.0.  This is the partial output of ktrace/kdump on "rm -rf
/tmp/foo/", where this sub-directory included a file "bar":

 24056 rm       CALL  unlink(0x23140)
 24056 rm       NAMI  "bar"
 24056 rm       RET   unlink 0
 24056 rm       CALL  fchdir(0x3)
 24056 rm       RET   fchdir 0
 24056 rm       CALL  rmdir(0x22000)
 24056 rm       NAMI  "/tmp/foo/"
 24056 rm       RET   rmdir -1 errno 21 Is a directory

IMHO, rmdir(2) should strip trailing slashes, as per almost any other
system call (eg. open(2)) which collapses multiple slashes to one, and
also permits trailing slashes.

Otherwise, the manual page for rmdir(2) should include a note about
EISDIR being a valid error.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734			VE3TCP		robohack!woods
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; UniForum Canada <woods@uniforum.ca>