Re: du: fts and vfat

[Jim Meyering]

Al Viro <address@hidden> wrote:
> The real issue is that starting cluster won't work at all for empty
> files.  IOW, ftruncate() would change st_ino; no-go for all kinds of
> obvious reasons.  Now, one _could_ play games with separating inode
> numbers of directories and non-directories, but that causes too much
> PITA.  What we have is a guaranteed "st_ino doesn't change for the
> lifetime of in-core inode", without any promise of persistence beyond
> that.  Since way back - at least '99, IIRC.

Here (in gnulib's fts.c), inodes are only ever compared for
directories, so treating directories specially would help.
While FAT may not be worth even a small PITA, some other types of
file systems with similar limitations might be, e.g., FUSE-based ones.