forrest@cgl.ucsf.edu@blia.UUCP (02/18/87)
I once needed to write a function in C that would take a file specification and return 0 or 1 depending on if the file was a directory or not. Coming from a Unix background, I thought this would be easy. It wasn't. Even after I figured out how to use FABs, RABs, and XABs it still wasn't possible using RMS. It turned out that the magic bit that says that a file is a directory is only accessable by using QIOs to call the disk ACP. For reasons I've never been able to figure out, there is no XAB that gives access to the directory bit, even though you can access to almost everything else in a file header through XABs. At every DECUS I've attended I've mentioned this to every VMS developer I find and they always say that it does seem like an ommision but nothing is ever done about it. I admit that this is not the most earth shattering problem, especially now that there is a 'stat' call supplied in the VAX C runtime library, but all my Unix friends laugh at me and throw things at me all the time. Jon Forrest ucbvax!mtxinu!blia!forrest Learn it, know it, love it.