Re: coreutils-8.3: test failed: ls/stat-dtype and touch/no-dereference

[Jim Meyering]

Voelker, Bernhard wrote:
> $3 = {d_ino    = 289015472,
>       d_off    = 4096,
>       d_reclen = 24,
>       d_type   = 0 '\0',
>       d_name = "s", '\0' <repears 254 times>}

Thanks.  That confirms what I suspected:
your system's readdir sets d_type for directories,
but not for symlinks.

What type of file system is that?

I *could* try to make the test detect that and skip,
but I'm inclined to let it continue to fail.

This particular test is a little odd.
It'd be best if there were a way to determine
portably whether dirent.d_type is valid without
using GNU ls to do it.  If anyone can suggest a way,
please let us know.

At least this test does probably add a little test coverage.

> BTW: why 600?!?
>> mkdir d && ln -s . d/s && chmod 600 d

That is to ensure that ls gets its type information about d/s
without using stat-like system calls (i.e., via readdir's d_type member).