This is the mail archive of the binutils@sources.redhat.com mailing list for the binutils project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: Gas vs irregular files


Hi Maciej,

>  This patch:
>
> http://sources.redhat.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/src/gas/input-file.c.diff?r1=1.11&r2=1.12&cvsroot=src
>
> breaks setups that invoke gas on non-regular files, e.g. like:
>
> $ as -o /dev/null /dev/null
>
> which may be used to check for supported command line options.

Urk - is this really done ?

One workaround would be to use an empty file:

    % rm -f empty.s
    % touch empty.s
    % as -o /dev/null empty.s
    % rm empty.s

Although I suspect that this would not be popular.
    
> And I find the new setup breaking the *nix tradition of treating all
> files the same as far as possible.

How so ?

> The ChangeLog entry states it's for detecting directories -- if so,
> it should do that explicitly with S_ISDIR().

Well yes and no.  The point is that it is not sensible to attempt to
assemble anything other than a regular text file.  Hence the code uses
S_ISREG() to check for files for which there is no point in even
attempting to call open() or read().


> And why has it be done at all?  If a system doesn't support reading 
> directories, it'll refuse to do so.

And if it does support them ?  What is the assembler supposed to do
with them ? Assemble every source file it finds in the directory ?


I am not against altering this patch if necessary, but I would like to
know why the current behaviour is wrong.

Cheers
        Nick
        


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]