Mail Archives: cygwin/2011/01/12/05:48:10
On Jan 12 11:28, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Jan 11 07:58, Eric Blake wrote:
> > On 01/11/2011 02:54 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > > I can not reproduce the effect, at least not on W7, but apparently it
> > > happens on some systems. So, given that the directory size is
> > > irrelevant for all practical purposes anyway, and given that there's no
> > > application which has problems with a directory size of 0, should Cygwin
> > > just always set st_size to 0 for directories? Independent of the
> > > underlying FS?
> >
> > Always returning 0 size for all directories, regardless of FS, is
> > certainly the simplest workaround. I'd say go for it.
>
> What I'm missing is the information if the allocation size is
> affected as well. You can't see that when using ls(1), but you
> can by using stat(1). So, here's the question:
>
> For a directory which changes size in one of the observed scenarios,
> what does stat print? Does it look like this:
>
> $ stat weird_dir | grep Size
> Size: 0 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 65536 directory
> $ stat weird_dir | grep Size
> Size: 4096 Blocks: 4 IO Block: 65536 directory
>
> or does it look like this:
>
>
> $ stat weird_dir | grep Size
> Size: 0 Blocks: 4 IO Block: 65536 directory
> $ stat weird_dir | grep Size
> Size: 4096 Blocks: 4 IO Block: 65536 directory
>
> ?
On second thought, let's take a step back.
Actually, directories can change all the time. Why on earth is tar
checking the st_size member of a directory at all? That's a bug IMO.
No application should do that. I understand that a change in the inode
number points to the fact that the directory has been replaced
underfoot, but why should tar be concerned that a directory has changed
its size while it's reading files from it? I mean, even during a tar
backup, there's no reason to expect that files are *not* added or
deleted to a directory by other applications, and these actions may
naturally change the size of the directory.
Having said that, I don't think it's correct to change Cygwin here.
It's just a bug in tar. The fact that the directory size changes even
if the content hasn't changed is just a side effect of the OS MO. It
doesn't matter if the directory has actually changed or not. It's not
in the hand of a single application.
Corinna
--
Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat
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