On 10/13/2014 08:56 PM, Eric Blake wrote: > The Cygwin developers have been trying to improve some d_type hints > given during readdir(), to return DT_DIR instead of DT_UNKNOWN for > obvious directories, as an example. But testing the patches for > correctness has proved to be a bit of a challenge for testing. On an > IRC chat, we discovered that it is really difficult to find out what > d_type lists for a given file without using a debugger or writing a > custom program - most GNU code is using it as an optimization to avoid > lstat(), but never directly outputs that the optimization took place. > So the idea was raised: could we teach stat(1) a new format arg that > would make it painfully obvious what d_type hint is associated with a > given file? > > Of course, such a format is not trivial, and must not be part of the > default stat output. Given 'stat --format=... a', you'd have to do > readdir() on "." until you find "a", in order to get to the d_type. But > I couldn't think of any better utility to enhance to easily get at > d_type information from the shell. At least, stat(1) feels like a > better choice than ls(1) for adding the enhanced output information. > > What do you think? Should I spend time writing up a patch?
Maybe, though coreutils' tests also check d_type is available. Would this suffice for cygwin? http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob;f=tests/d_type-check;hb=HEAD cheers, Pádraig.
