bug#7247: readdir obsoleteness?

[Alan Curry]

Ian Martin writes:
> 

A message containing only ASCII characters which was nevertheless encoded as
quoted-unreadable, with its original newlines senselessly escaped, and then
more newlines injected, forming a bricktext with continuation markers. Does
yahoo send them out like this or is it a mailing list manager hatchet job?

Reformatted for sanity:

>Hi,
>just trawling the webpages, I got caught in a loop.  The syscalls page states: 

Don't read man pages you find on the web, unless you're deliberately looking
for information on old systems. Up to date man pages for Linux are at
ftp.$COUNTRYCODE.kernel.org:/pub/linux/docs/man-pages

>...
>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most one directory entry at a time, and is superseded by  sys_getdents().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. 

You started at readdir(2), you ended at readdir(3). That's not a loop.
readdir(3) is the POSIXly portable C-level interface. readdir(2) and
getdents(2) are the Linux-specific implementations which you don't need to
know about unless you're writing code at or below the libc layer.

-- 
Alan Curry