On Thu, 3 Feb 2011 20:49:17 -0500
erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net> wrote:

> > FreeBSD 8.0 lets you cat the raw data of a directory, and I would
> > expect the other free BSDs to have that misfeature, too.
> 
> i don't see how allowing this is a misfeature.  regardless,
> plan 9 allows it.
> 
> ; sha1sum < /adm/timezone
> 05d16cd216a58fae746ae36f72c784d10bcc1392

It felt like a misfeature every time I dumped raw directory entries to
my terminal, and I didn't think of a good use like your example.

This feature might be more useful if the directory entries were
presented to clients of the FS in a textual format, but that would
encourage, if not require, far more parsing in the system, and that is
bad both for performance and for security.


Robert Ransom