Love ANSI C, except when it comes to strings!

So, in class the other night, we wrote up a very simplified version of ls. I was just trying to demonstrate to the students what is involved in opening a directory and reading directory entry structures out. I figured ls would be the simplest example of doing that. Well, I got the idea, lets take it a bit further than just printing file names, and print out some info from the stat structure for each file as well.

However, to call stat, you need to pass in a full path, but we only have a filename. I really didn't feel like doing a bunch of string manipulation in C in class, so I tried to see if we could get the stat info by some how using the inode number. I couldn't come up with a solution quickly and the class was basically over, so I told the students I we would come back to it next time.

So I kept researching. I was convinced there should be a way to get the same info stat returns by just using the inode number. I mean the inode is where that information is stored for crying out loud. So after wasting part of my life searching, I found some answers that basically said the POSIX standard won't let you use inode number directly for anything because it's not portable. Basically, some systems may not even implement their filesystems using inodes. So that wouldn't be a portable solution, and as we all know, the whole point of POSIX is to make code portable. So the only reliable way to get stat info, is to give it a path. So I realized I was stuck having to do string manipulation.

After giving in to the fact that I wouldn't be able to avoid using string manipulation, I started writing the code. Man, I forgot how painful it is to do something as simple as joining two strings together in C. I had written a function to take a path, and list the files in the directory. It was a very simple function. Keyword being was. After adding a bunch of code to create an appropriately sized temporary char array to store my temp string in, and then all the code to concatenate the strings and make sure there were path separators, etc, the function size just ballooned. Most of the code, probably more than half, was just for manipulating strings.

Anyway, I'm not saying I hate it, just that it's a bit painful. After mostly using python for years, you REALLY take for granted how easy simple string manipulation is.

Ok, that is all for now, just had to vent.