site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com Domainkey-signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:mime-version:in-reply-to:references:content-type:message-id:content-transfer-encoding:from:subject:date:to:x-mailer; b=DSRIu/dzxhDdYUcKBQWpy005BmZEHQdZfSwI8zooy476y1klVRAPVQk5pqt2dKXCweOCLUPEuzm5uiL8bwykAMLB7RmRJ+Ztk9HGM7VTR0nfR0n1KEPJjN/lYXt8o0OnNWw+3UBejwGuMd/RQosbiCH7uodlAZ9StYvosR7l9Qw= On 30/nov/05, at 22:05, Camillo Lugaresi wrote: This can be done using realpath (man 3 realpath). For example: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <sys/param.h> int main (int argc, char **argv) { char real_path[PATH_MAX]; if (argc < 2) return 1; printf("%s\n", realpath(argv[1], real_path)); return 0; } Here is the solution I ended up using in a cross-platform program. On Windows, stat is not Posix-compliant: Camillo _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... I'll reply to my own message so that the solution will be in the archives of the list. I am looking for a way to determine the canonical form for a file name. Suppose that there is a file named "FILE" in the directory / folder/, which is on an HFS+ volume: then the canonical form of the path "/folder/file" would be "/folder/FILE". Both paths refer to the same file, but the representation on disk is FILE. I need to know this for the purpose of comparison, and I cannot simply do a case-insensitive comparison because I do not know if / folder/ is on a case-insensitive or case-sensitive volume. I have thought of opening the file and then using fstat on the descriptor, but is there a better way to do it?

From a broader point of view, what I need is a reliable solution for determining if two paths refer to the same file, without assuming anything about the filesystem on which it is located. I have searched the archives of this list, but I could not find an answer to this question.

On Unix-like systems, use stat and compare inodes and device ids. The Posix standard says: The st_ino and st_dev fields taken together uniquely identify the file within the system. [...] Networked implementations of a POSIX-conforming system must guarantee that all files visible within the file tree (including parts of the tree that may be remotely mounted from other machines on the network) on each individual processor are uniquely identified by the combination of the st_ino and st_dev fields. (from <http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/sys/ stat.h.html>) Testing showed that Mac OS X and Linux implement it correctly for both local and network file systems. In general, since this behaviour is specified in Posix, it is expected to work on all modern Unix-like systems. The one exception I have heard of is when a file system with an unusually large inode number is mounted on a system where ino_t is too small: in that case, a hash of the real inode number is returned in st_ino, and there is the possibility of a collision. But that is a very rare scenario, and such a collision would be a mere annoyance in the context of the application I was working on. st_ino Number of the information node (the inode) for the file (UNIX- specific). On UNIX file systems, the inode describes the file date and time stamps, permissions, and content. When files are hard- linked to one another, they share the same inode. The inode, and therefore st_ino, has no meaning in the FAT, HPFS, or NTFS file systems. (from <http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en- us/vclib/html/_crt__stat.2c_._wstat.2c_._stati64.2c_._wstati64.asp>) In practice, 0 is returned for all files on most filesystems. Windows can return file IDs for local file systems using GetFileInformationByHandle, but unlike in Posix, there are no guarantees for network file systems. So, on Windows we fall back on comparing names, using the technique recommended here: <http:// blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/10/17/481600.aspx> I hope this information will be helpful to others who face a similar problem. :-) This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com