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Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 16:00:02 -0500
From: linux@sigint.cs.purdue.edu
To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] autofs4 symlink size
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On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 01:24:10PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> >
> > I sent this to the autofs4 maintainer a while ago, but never heard back.
> > autofs4 doesn't return a size for the symlinks it creates, which is
> > inconsistent with other filesystems.  (The Almquist shell uses the sizes
> > of path components to allocate buffers during a walk, so it can't traverse
> > autofs4-linked paths.)
> 
> That's IMNSHO a bug in the Almquist shell, at least if autofs4 returns
> zero, but it's also a bug in autofs4.

True, ash could do things differently, but I don't think expecting the
filesystem to return correct metadata is a bug.  Should we distrust stat(2)
and count the bytes in a file ourselves, just to be sure?