Hello Justin,
>> Well, the following comment says "ignore anything but regular files",
>> so I'm supposing that that is the behavior that we actually want here
>> and failed to implement correctly. There might be scope for
>> additional directory-reading functions, but I'd think you'd want
>> more information (such as the file type) returned from anything
>> that doesn't act this way.
>
> Maybe pg_stat_file() deserves similar attention ? Right now, it'll fail on a
> broken link. If we changed it to lstat(), then it'd work, but it'd also show
> metadata for the *link* rather than its target.
Yep. I think this traditional answer is the rational answer.
As I wrote about an earlier version of the patch, ISTM that instead of
reinventing, extending, adapting various ls variants (with/without
metadata, which show only files, which shows target of links, which shows
directory, etc.) we would just need *one* postgres "ls" implementation
which would be like "ls -la arg" (returns file type, dates), and then
everything else is a wrapper around that with appropriate filtering that
can be done at the SQL level, like you started with recurse.
It would reduce the amount of C code and I find the SQL-level approach
quite elegant.
--
Fabien.