Making a gpg library

[David Champion]

On 2000.10.25, in <20001025145256.Y22713@gnupg.de>,
	"Werner Koch" <wk@gnupg.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Oct 2000, Florian Weimer wrote:
> 
> > I think you can emulate /dev/fd this way: If you encounter /dev/fd/NR
> > on the command line, just do fdopen(NR, some_mode).
> 
> That should work and is similar to the thing gawk does.
> 
> HPUX, Solaris, AIX, fooix folks please complain *now* or be quite
> forever on this topic :-)

I'm mainly a Solaris person.  We have /dev/fd/*, but I still think that
while clever, this is a *highly* unexpected way to deal with fd's (that
is, "unintuitive").  It's a neat trick to support, but I don't think it
should be relied upon as the sole means of fd access.

My gut feeling is that file paths should actually exist, not just be
ghosted in application software.

It's also conceivable that some "innovative" vendor would come by with
an alternate path for a fd filesystem -- say, /dev/fds/*.  That would
certainly confuse matters on that platform.

-- 
 -D.	dgc@uchicago.edu	NSIT	University of Chicago