Re: Implementing stat() with FindFirstFile()

From: Magnus Bäck <baeck@swipnet.se>
Date: Mar 24, 2009, 21:54 UTC
Message-ID: <20090324215416.GB27249@jeeves.jpl.local>
In-Reply-To: <200903212055.15026.j6t@kdbg.org>

On Saturday, March 21, 2009 at 20:55 CET,
     Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org> wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Samstag, 21. März 2009, Magnus Bäck wrote:
>
> > Is there any reason why compat/win32.h uses GetFileAttributesEx()
> > instead of FindFirstFile() to implement the stat() call on Windows?
> > The current implementation requires each queried file to be opened
> > and closed while FindFirstFile() only reads the directory.
> 
> There is: File times are extremely important for git. Unfortunately,
> MS's implementation of stat and utime are broken, and they do use
> FindFirstFile(). Read up on the topic here:
> 
> http://search.cpan.org/~shay/Win32-UTCFileTime-1.50/lib/Win32/UTCFileTime.pm

Quite interesting, thanks. As it often is, "obvious" changes that haven't been made aren't that obvious after all.

From what I gather the problematic conversion takes place in the Win32 layer, in which case we might be able to call the ZwQueryDirectoryFile() kernel routine directly via ntdll.dll to obtain the file times straight from the file system. Has anyone explored that path, and would it be acceptable to make such a change?

[...]

-- 
Magnus Bäck
baeck@swipnet.se