Re: [gawk-stable] bug: fatal error when getline from directory

[Paolo]

On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 06:59:22PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> The definition may be ``broad/vague'', but everybody knows what is a
> text file: it's a file that contains human-readable text.  Directories
> don't count.

please define 'human-readable'.
POSIX 'text file' is any sequence of chars except for '\0', in 1+ lines
shorter than LINE_MAX, which is OS/implementation-specific. So you may well
have a 'text file' which isn't that 'human-readable' at all.

*I* might agree that dirs aren't "text" nor "binary" files, yet you can 
open(2)+read(2) a dir without a glitch - you get an EOF.

But that's not the point.


-- 
paolo