[Sbcl-devel] PROBE-FILE problem

[Richard M K. <kr...@pr...>]

(Peter Seibel has had some trouble sending the following message, so I'm
forwarding for him.  RmK)

-+-
Try this in 1.0.14 on GNU/Linux

 (probe-file #p"/home/peter/.asdf/asdf-binary-locations.lisp")

when that file does not exist but a file (not a directory)
/home/peter/.asdf does. It errors out rather than returning NIL. This
seems to be due to stat(2)'s behavior of erroring with ENOTDIR when "A
component of the path is not a directory."

It seems to me that the behavior of PROBE-FILE should be to return the
truename or NIL in all but the most extreme cases. Some folks might
argue that the second Exception Situation clause in the spec would allow
barfing but that seems like a bit of a weak argument--it's not that the
filesystem *can't* tell you that the given pathname is or is not the
name of a file--you just have to ask the right way.

-Peter


-- 
Peter Seibel                     : pe...@gi...
A Billion Monkeys Can't be Wrong : http://www.gigamonkeys.com/blog/
Practical Common Lisp            : http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/
Coders at Work                   : http://www.codersatwork.com/


-+-