Re: bug #17457: "grep -r foo . > somefile" goes into an infinite loop

[Jim Meyering]

Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 07/24/2011 09:06 PM, Jim Meyering wrote:
>>> >  What about a few POSIX-violating fringe operating systems (Windows and
>>> >  DJGPP come to mind)?:)   For Windows we can write our own stat
>>> >  function in cygwin, but for DJGPP I think we're in a bad situation...
>> AFAIK, DJGPP is not relevant these days.
>> What Windows environment are you worried about?
>
> All.  Microsoft documentation says that st_ino is zero for "FAT, HPFS,
> or NTFS file systems".
>
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/14h5k7ff%28v=VS.100%29.aspx

IMHO, FAT is so lacking in functionality that is not in the running ;-)
HPFS (from the OS/2 era) is probably even less relevant, here.

Regarding NTFS, can you point to a real gnulib-using application that is
misbehaving because of this?  I've seen that some NTFS implementations
*do* have usable inode support.  Both cygwin and fuse-based ones do,
so you must mean mingw.

> However, we could fix that in gnulib.

Is it possible to do that without a run-time penalty?
Making everyone pay a price all the time just in case someday they
operate on a file residing on an NTFS partition...
Obviously, we try hard to avoid that.