[Caml-list] lstat on windows native

[skaller <skaller@users.sourceforge.net>]

Currently, I need to use lstat (as pointed out in previous
email) but it isn't implemented on Windows native port
according to 3.07 documentation.

If I understand correctly this means my program won't
compile/link on Win32, which isn't very nice.

What I'm trying to do is somewhat problematic:
recursively find all the files starting from
a given directory. 

I'm skipping over symbolic links to avoid duplication,
infinite recursion with . and .., and because the user
can specify a set of "root" directories, and therefore
always add (the target of) a skipped symlink to the set.
It is also possible to exclude bad directories/files.

To fix this problem, I can use plain 'stat' and
require the client to specify all exclusions/inclusions,
and that will work on Windows and Unix, but it is
*extremely ugly* because you'd have to exclude

/usr/include/.
/usr/include/..

etc for every subdirectory ..

I wonder if this function can be implemented for Windows?
I'm not sure what it means (I don't understand Windows shortcuts).
If a "proper" implementation can't be provided, I wonder
if a "cheat" which simply defines it the same as 'stat'
would make sense. At least my code would then work
without requiring conditional compilation (which Ocaml
doesn't support natively).

I can detect the cheat by Sys.os_type dynamically
and do special (less reliable OS dependent) processing,
but of course I can't write:

if Sys.os_type = "Win32" then stat else lstat

[Felix can actually do that, since the constant
folder guarrantees to reduce conditionals
over constants in a somewhat vain attempt to
reduce the need for preprocessor based 
conditional compilation]

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net



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