Re: [9front] /proc/n/fd format clarification

[binary cat <dogedoge61@gmail.com>]

> I suspect version numbers never go up much in practice.

Sometimes they don't, but they do quite often.
Every directory I checked had at least one file with a qid version over 9.
/env was over 1000.

 A format that seems to have fixed width fields,
but actually doesn't, seems like a bad idea.
I guess it's ok for /proc/n/fd, since the first line will always be
variable length,
but it seems problematic for /fd/nctl.

It makes it seem like you could read data from a fixed offset instead
of parsing the whole file,
which will work most of the time, but will break if you open a file
that has been edited too much.
Imagine a script that works the first 9 times, then breaks. Not a good look.

What I would do is keep the qid version as decimal (for backward compatibility),
but simply pad it enough (10 spaces) so it's fixed width, like the
rest of the fields.
This would mean you wouldn't have to read through the whole file to
get the filename.

Either way, I do think the documentation should be clearer about this.

– binarycat