bug#7247: readdir obsoleteness?

[Eric Blake]

On 10/19/2010 02:46 PM, Ian Martin wrote:
> Hi,
> just trawling the webpages, I got caught in a loop.  The syscalls page states:
>
> Of the above, 9 are obsolete, namely getrlimit, oldfstat, oldlstat, oldolduname,
> oldstat, olduname, readdir, select and vm86old
> ...
> Then there is __NR_readdir corresponding to old_readdir(), which will  read at
> most one directory entry at a time, and is superseded by  sys_getdents().
>
> however, on the getdents man page:
>
> DescriptionThis is not the function you are interested in. Look at readdir(3)for
> the POSIX conforming C library interface. This page documents the bare kernel
> system call interface.

Thanks for the report.  However, you reached the coreutils mailing list, 
which has nothing to do with syscall man pages.  Did you mean to send 
this to the Linux man-pages project instead?

At any rate, I see no loop.  Try 'man 3 readdir' to see the difference 
from 'man readdir', since there is indeed a difference between the 
obsolete syscall readdir (readdir.2) and the very-much-current libc 
library call (readdir.3).

--
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org