On Sun, 04 Jan 2004 23:01:04 +0100, Andries Brouwer said:

> A common Unix idiom is testing for the identity
> of two files by comparing st_ino and st_dev.
> A broken idiom?

Comparing two of these obtained at the same time is *usually* a good
test, although racy even on current systems. (Consider the case of an
unlink()/creat() pair between the two stat() calls - there's been more than
one race condition resulting in a security hole based on THIS one).  It's
only safe if you actually have an open reference to both files before you
fstat() either one.  And yes, it has to be fstat(), as you can't guarantee
that the file referenced by path in stat() is the one you did an open() on.

Comparing the st_ino/st_dev for a file to day with one from last Friday has
NEVER been a good idea.