unexpected softupdate inconsistency

[Kevin Oberman]

> From: Gregory Bond <gnb at itga.com.au>
> Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 10:03:59 +1100
> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
> 
> 
> msergeant at snsonline.net said:
> > In situations like this it can be useful to use vim on the dir entry
> > that is affected and remove the invalid filenames. This has worked for
> > me before.
> 
> I'm astounded.  
> 
> Directories are not supposed to be modifiable by user-space processes at all,
> only with link/unlink/creat/etc system calls, because the risk of filesystem
> corruption is huge.  What does vim do here that rm doesn't? And how does it get
> around the "cant write(2) directories" ban?
> 
> See man open:
> 
>      [EISDIR]           The named file is a directory, and the arguments spec-
>                         ify it is to be opened for writing.

emacs and XEmacs dired has been able to manipulate directories for as
ling as I've been around. I assume that they DO use the standard system
calls. (This includes vim, which I don't use.)
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634