Detecting directory changes

[Dave Jones]

[Please ignore my previous post, sent by accident before I finished it..]

In message <3E72073E.1060700 at qsl.net>,
  "John E. Malmberg" <wb8tyw at qsl.net> writes:
>The file system is scheduled for a major overhaul.  I can not give 
>details, but any program that makes any assumptions about undocumented 
>internal structures such as names of locks may break.

Yes, such a program may break in the future when someone eventually tries to
run it under some future version of VMS.  In the mean time, there are problems
to be solved now where using undisclosed (they hopefully were documented
somewhere by the developers) interfaces is the only practical solution.
Such a program should isolate and abstract the fragile pieces as much
possible.

>Now I have put in requests for features to the file system, like a 64 
>bit ino_t type, storing at file close the apparent UNIX size of a record 
>oriented file for stat to return, storing the UTC time in addition to 
>local time so that stat will run faster.  I have also requested support 
>for alternate filenames, to help support ODS-2/ODS-5/ODS-? and 8.3 file 
>lookups for applications like Pathworks Advanced Server and SAMBA.

Obviously, the first step is making a file header 8K instead of 512 bytes in 
size :-)

For UTC times in the file headers, I think it would be more compatible with
ODS-2/5 if you stored the timezone offsets to be applied to the existing
local time timestamps.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
David L. Jones               |      Phone:    (614) 292-6929
Ohio State University        |      Internet:
140 W. 19th St. Rm. 231a     |               jonesd at er6s1.eng.ohio-state.edu
Columbus, OH 43210           |               vman+ at osu.edu

Disclaimer: I'm looking for marbles all day long.