Re: [bug #17877] Invalid "No such file or directory" error on filesystem without stable inode numbers

[James Youngman]

On 9/28/06, Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
> Follow-up Comment #1, bug #17877 (project findutils):
>
> > There are several Linux filesystems (including smbfs, fat, and
> > some FUSE based ones) which cannot provide stable inode numbers
> > for unreferenced files or directories.

OP, can you provide a test case which demonstrates the problem?
I will investigate when I have web and SSH access again next week.

> That's the problem.  If an OS can't provide stable inode numbers, it is not
> POSIX compliant.  find shouldn't have to bend over backwards to work around
> broken file systems.

I don't agree.   POSIX-compliant systems are allowed to support
non-POSIX-compliant filesystems, and GNU findutils should be able to
search them.

> You should be reporting this bug to the file system
> people.

But you're right about this.

> That said, it would be nice if fts could recognize such broken file systems
> and work around their flaws.  But that is an issue for gnulib, not findutils,
> since find 4.3.0 is the first version to use gnulib's fts instead of its own
> homegrown traversal routines.

It's quite difficult to do this kind of recognition without stat()ing
each mount point in /etc/mtab and that can cause a hang on machines
which are clients of unresponsive NFS servers.

James.