Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH] handle EOVERFLOW and ENOTDIR gracefully in file/directory-exists?

[Alan Post]

On Sat, Oct 08, 2011 at 04:11:47PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> Christian Kellermann scripsit:
> 
> > Wouldn't the right answer be in this case "We don't know whether this
> > file exists, because some Bad Thing(tm) happened while trying to find
> > out" instead of yes or no?
> 
> No.  If ENAMETOOLONG is returned, the file can't possibly exist (because
> the filesystem has no way to represent it), so it's always correct to
> return #f in that case.
> 

(I'm sorry this got divided into three messages!  I'm typing faster
than I'm thinking...)

The closest errno value to "Bag Thing(tm)" is EFAULT, meaning you
gave a pointer to the kernel it couldn't do anything with.  IIRC
Solaris just terminates your process, but OpenBSD (and very likely
others) scold you with EFAULT.

-Alan
-- 
.i ma'a lo bradi cu penmi gi'e du