new VFS directory listing parser

Leonard den Ottolander leonard at den.ottolander.nl
Wed Oct 19 12:28:37 UTC 2005


Hi Roland,

On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 01:29 +0200, Roland Illig wrote:
> Forgot the patch. ;)

A major problem with this patch is that you move a lot of stuff from
vfs.c to vfsparse.c and put your own copyright on the latter. This
totally obscures which code actually is being reused and what is being
newly introduced. This makes the patch very hard to review and it is not
very polite towards the original authors.

Could you maybe document the various "OS lines" here?

Your approach of parsing the unix fields sequentially has a drawback wrt
uid/gids in case of white space in the names. This can be avoided by
only accepting numerical uid/gids.

Another approach is to scan for expected patterns: Output starts with
permissions followed by number of links and the month also has a unique
pattern for which we can scan (3 chars (no digit and no whitespace)
surrounded by whitespace and digit on both sides). From there we can
match the numerical/date columns to the left and the right. Assuming
date/time is always 3 columns this way we can avoid ambiguities if the
uid, gid or name contains spaces.

O, and I think the -g flag shouldn't be used on ls output. If we are
interested in the group then why not in the owner? vfs_parse_ls_lga()
might need to be renamed to vfs_parse_ls_la().

Leonard.

-- 
mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research





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