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bug#23263: cat: missingfile: No such file or directory
From: |
Jonny Grant |
Subject: |
bug#23263: cat: missingfile: No such file or directory |
Date: |
Sun, 10 Apr 2016 20:41:06 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.6.0 |
Hello Paul
On 10/04/16 20:01, Paul Eggert wrote:
Jonny Grant wrote:
Hello
I noticed that cat doesn't have an accurate message in the following
use-case:
$ cat missingfile
cat: missingfile: No such file or directory
$ mkdir testdir
$ cat testdir
cat: testdir: Is a directory
The "No such file or directory" message occurs because the operating
system does not have a separate error code for missing directory versus
missing file. In the example you gave, perhaps the working directory is
missing (this can happen on some systems), or perhaps there is no file
named "missingfile" in the working directory; the same code is returned
for both situations.
Other GNU tools that only accept files, don't have this problem though.
ie GNU objdump. They workaround the ENOENT problem.
address@hidden:~$ objdump -d missingfile
objdump: 'missingfile': No such file
cat doesn't ever accept directories, so it should never output a message
mentioning directory.
This is not a coreutils issue, but is instead a kernel and C library
issue. It's not something that coreutils can "fix", even assuming it was
agreed that it was a bug. If it really bothers you, I suggest writing
the POSIX standardization committee, but I should warn you that you'll
need a strong argument to change something that has been standardized
for decades.
yes I agree. I feel it is something that is a POSIX deficiency, having
the same error code for files and directories. The POSIX standard
ideally updated to reflect the situation in the year 2016. Technology
shouldn't be static. I don't have the influence to persuade POSIX to
reform unfortunately.
Thank you again for your reply.
Regards, Jonny