Re: file descriptor diet

[Jim Meyering]

Bruno Haible wrote:
>> ... as part of my campaign to put GNU tar on a file descriptor diet ...
>
> Can you please say a few words about what it means, and what is the 
> motivation?
>
> File descriptors are a central concept in POSIX. Is something wrong with it?
>
> To which class of programs does this diet apply? To all programs? Or only
> to those that spawn subprocesses? Or only to those that use fork() without
> exec()?

He means merely that when tar traverses a tree of depth N
it will no longer require N open file descriptors.