9fans archive / 1998 / 04 / 52 /    prev next

From: Russ Cox rsc@pla...
Subject: [9fans] allowing space (ASCII 0x20) in file names
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 09:04:51 -0400

> One thing I don't get is why "Fields that contain names are 28-byte
> strings (including a terminal NUL (zero) byte)". Why send the zero,
> if it's always zero and it's always there? Why not use these 28 bytes
> as a sort of persistant fid?

If you don't send the zero, how do you indicate filenames less
than 27 bytes?  How would "x.c" get transmitted?  I suppose you
could increase the name length by one by adding the hack that
there's an implicit zero on byte 29 that isn't transmitted,
but it's an ugly hack for a questionable cause (one byte?) and
it would make things like strlen, etc. annoying.