[1336] in Athena Bugs
Re: (VS2000) Version 6.0R: /usr/athena/emacsclient solution
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Sommerfeld)
Tue Nov 8 11:40:17 1988
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 88 11:39:52 EST
From: Bill Sommerfeld <wesommer@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: jik@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Two comments:
1) getwd should not return an error if it can't open the parent
directory! There's got to be a way to get around that! If I can do
"ls -ld /mit/foo" on an unreadable directory and see it, then surely
there is some way for getwd to get the name of that directory!
Perhaps it can divine the name of the directory by reading pigeon
entrails, but it _can't_ get the information through the UNIX kernel.
There is no magic system call in UNIX which gives you the full
pathname of an object (file or directory); the only way to get the
pathname of the working directory is to chase the `..' pointers until
you appear to find the root.
2) emacsclient should not simply abort if it can't open the parent
directory. It should signal an intelligent error. If it had said,
"can't open .." I would immediately have realized that I was in a
problem directory and moved back into my homedir. Of course, this
shouldn't be a problem at all because of (1) above, but we do what we
can, right...
Blame the FSF.
I vaguely remember writing code to print the error message in the
original version of the emacs client/server; this may have been
changed when the FSF took control of it. Unfortunately, I don't have
a copy of exactly what I submitted to FSF, so I can't really verify
this.
- Bill
