Re: Bug#369822: ls -i stats unnecessarily

[Paul Eggert]

Ian Jackson <address@hidden> writes:

> This behaviour is expected: if you readdir the directory containing
> a mountpoint, you get the inode number of the directory in the
> underlying filesystem;

That's not the behavior that I expected.  Also, it's not useful
behavior--at least, it's not useful for the vast majority of
real-world applications.  In contrast, it is useful for 'ls -i' to
print the inode number of the root of the mounted file system, for
'find -inum' to use that inode number, and so forth.

I can understand why readdir might have the behavior that you
describe: it might be more efficient internally.  But that doesn't
make it correct, or even "expected".  It's a bug in readdir.