From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 109fba,df854b5838c3e14 X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,df854b5838c3e14 X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,df854b5838c3e14 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 10db24,fec75f150a0d78f5 X-Google-Attributes: gid10db24,public From: karish@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Chuck Karish) Subject: Re: ANSI C and POSIX (was Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada) Date: 1996/04/15 Message-ID: <4kuc0m$398@nntp.Stanford.EDU>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 147662769 references: <4kpceq$e4b@solutions.solon.com> organization: Mindcraft, Inc. newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.c++,comp.edu Date: 1996-04-15T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article , Robert Dewar wrote: >On the other hand, that same book says >that unlink is implemented in all systems, so clearly at least for the >moment unlink is safer to use if you are aiming at maximum portability. >Rememerb that gcc is targeted to more than 300 different C library >environments, and you want to absolutely minimize conditional stuff. >That's what I meant by having a strenuous view of portability. I would >rather guess that Peter is pretty Unix oriented, and of course we are >trying for a wider scope of portability than Unix! But unlink() is a UNIX system call that was also implemented in many other environments. unlink() on UNIX and POSIX systems is only guaranteed to work if the argument is the name of a regular file; on many systems, unlink() fails for directories. The rationale for ANSI C says that remove() was meant to be a generalized re-casting of the unlink() functionality, free of UNIX filesystem terminology ("link"). Implementations of remove() are allowed (but not required!) to do the right thing no matter what type of file they're used on. -- Chuck Karish karish@mindcraft.com (415) 323-9000 x117 karish@pangea.stanford.edu