From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Aharon Robbins <arnold@skeeve.com>
Message-Id: <200303301036.h2UAaEFZ031353@localhost.localdomain>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: [9fans] size on /proc files?
Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2003 13:36:14 +0300
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 86e46254-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

Just out of curiousity, what does ls -l on special files in /proc report?
On linux, e.g., /proc/filesystems shows up as a regular file, but of size
zero.  Yet when you cat it you get information.

This behavior broke the current gawk, where I'd rewritten the get_a_record
routines; they had a check:

	if (S_ISREG(sbuf.st_mode) && total > sbuf.st_size)
		flag |= AT_EOF;

I had to change this to

	if (S_ISREG(sbuf.st_mode) && sbuf.st_size > 0
	    && total > sbuf.st_size) ....

I am annoyed at the Linux behavior, but understand that the contents
of these "files" can change dynamically, making the reporting of a size
for stat difficult or impossible.

So, I was just curious how Plan 9 handles it.

Thanks,

Arnold Robbins