Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 16:49:17 -0600 (CST) From: Ryan Thompson <ryan@sasknow.com> To: Paul Everlund <tdv94ped@cs.umu.se> Cc: Jonathan Chen <jonc@chen.org.nz>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: cat: A bug or just as it should be? Message-ID: <20020419164225.G97343-100000@catalyst.sasknow.net> In-Reply-To: <3CC099F8.531ECECE@cs.umu.se>
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Paul Everlund wrote to Jonathan Chen: > > > Those "uuu" users, removed ones, are in no .his- > > > tory as there are no history file in the directory > > > /usr/home. > > > > You are cat'ing the contents of the directory "home" and getting > > binary output. > > Yep. But why does REMOVED directories show up? In another directory > removed files too shows up. Is this good? I can understand that dirs > and files that are on the HDD shows, but removed ones? Is this due > to left behind references of some kind? You are dumping the contents of a binary file (which happens to be a directory node) as ASCII. The fact that you can read anything in the output is an amazement. ;-) Directory nodes are really just a specific type of binary file, which happen to be recognized by the filesystem and OS as something special. Not unlike other binary files containing records, there tends to be a lot of leftover garbage as records are allocated, deleted, and changed. That's all you are seeing, and it has been completely normal for decades. :-) Pretty well everything in UNIX is a file. That was a conscious design decision years ago. - Ryan -- Ryan Thompson <ryan@sasknow.com> SaskNow Technologies - http://www.sasknow.com 901 1st Avenue North - Saskatoon, SK - S7K 1Y4 Tel: 306-664-3600 Fax: 306-664-3630 Saskatoon Toll-Free: 877-727-5669 (877-SASKNOW) North America To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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