Bob Arning <arning at charm.net> is widely believed to have written:

> To see if the file exists, it is opened in read-only mode.
[snip]
This is just one of a number of real sillinesses in the curent file
handling code (another directly related example is that there is a
different way to check for the existence of a file in FileDirectory -
see FileDirectory>fileExists:) that needs attacking sometime soon.

The carefully restricted set of file primitives that originally existed
are well suited to easy initial porting and machines with only ansi-C
libraries, but we can do much better on most machines and with plugins
to make good use of the available facilities.

A particular example I've had to work around recently is the copying of
files; there was no way to copy a file from one directory to another,
and once that was fixed there was no way to make sure the
permissions/types/blah were coreectly transferred; thus the ugly
hackette of FileCopyPlugin for the VMMaker package.

tim
-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- A natural talent for finding subliminal messages
in ice cubes.