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<amk>hey, just curious, why is it possible to cat directories on hurd? Is it just something the cat implementation doesnt take into account on hurd or something like that?

<jab>amk: I didn't even know that you could do that! haha.

<jab>does it output all of the text files back to back?

<amk>yeah its a bunch of junmbled file entries, kinda funky

<jab>amk... That's a little odd.

<jrtc27>being able to call read(2) on directories is an old BSDism

<jrtc27>back in the early days it was how ls and friends worked, when there was just a single file system

<jrtc27>readdir(2) didn't appear until BSD 4.2

<jrtc27>most BSDs kept the behaviour around, though it isn't particularly useful now it can be all manner of different formats, depending on the file system in use

<jrtc27>FreeBSD recently (a year or so ago?) made it no longer work

<amk>huh interesting, thanks jrtc27

IRC channel logs

2022-04-07.log