: > Yech, good point. I'm not even sure you can do any sort of sane
: > abstraction there.
: >
: > In that case, are we better off chopping it out entirely and leaving
: > it to library code, or making it a simple yes/no indicator that there
: > are some? (Chopping it out's probably the best thing)
:
: Chopping off sounds like less coding :-)

On top of which, ACLs suffer the same illness of any stat-based
checking, insofar as checks against them are only an approximation
to reality, potentially full of race conditions.  It's really the OS
that's going to do the ACL checking, and it'll do it when you do the
actual operation, not the stat() call.  Arguably a "correct" way to
program is to ignore stat-like stuff entirely and just try to do the
thing you want to do, and be prepared for the OS to reject it--which
you should have been prepared for anyway...

(Of course, fstat() does help with some of the race conditions by
intentionally "losing" the race, as it were.)

Larry