Subject: Re: Please test latest developer snapshot
From: Vorfeed Canal <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: Thomas Wolff <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2011 03:24:53 +0300
List-Id: <cygwin.cygwin.com>

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 6:20 PM, Thomas Wolff <[email-masked]> wrote:
> And this is not an artificial limitation but there is no way that this
> could conceivably work.

What do you mean "there is no way that this could conceivably work"?

It worked in Linux till it was explicitly forbidden...

See here, for example: http://lkml.org/lkml/1997/9/12/100

> By Unix design, removing a file or directory basically means removing
> its entry from its parent directory, so it is not an operation on the
> file in the first place (or on the target directory in this case).

Well, yeah - and this explains all subsequent effects. Directories are not
files, directory can only have one name at most so there are no confusion.

> The parent directory is obviously needed by design, thus "." is not
> something that could ever be removed (from where?).

From filesystem? This artificial limitation was added to POSIX (and
later to Linux) to fix some old broken scripts. I'm not sure if it was
good idea or not, but it's written in a standard now so that's how it
works.

But yes, it IS quite artificial limitation:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=fs/namei.c;h=0087cf9c2c6bccaf99000fbd0bfe95257549d81b;hb=HEAD#l2866

As you can see the only reason you can not rmdir(".") and then rmdir("..")
is because it's quite explicitly checked for to satisfy POSIX.

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