Thanks for the additional information regarding this. It doesn't affect me personally (either at work or home) at the moment, and probably won't do in the forseeable future; however, for those working with the MSWin filesystem, this could be important.

I suppose the real issue is how this might affect telldir in the context of the code I posted. I'm not in a position to test this but I'll attempt to paraphrase in *nix parlance. Given a truly empty directory (root or otherwise), e.g.

$ ls -al fred
ls: cannot access 'fred': No such file or directory
$ mkdir fred
$
[download]

Where a listing showed

$ ls -al fred
total 0
$
[download]

instead of

$ ls -al fred
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  2 ken staff  68 Jan 31 12:57 .
drwxr-xr-x 18 ken staff 612 Jan 31 12:57 ..
$
[download]

How would the "eh" handle be reported? Just to be clear, that's the one I showed as:

eh is a dirhandle       # eh = dirhandle to "pm_1208018_test_dir_empty"

If someone could test that and report their findings, it could provide useful information to anyone wanting to use this technique in the future.