Currently fs.watch does not have an option to specify if a directory
should be recursively watched for events across all subdirectories.
Several file watcher APIs support this. FSEvents on OS X > 10.5 is
one example. libuv has added support for FSEvents, but fs.watch had
no way to specify that a recursive watch was required.
fs.watch now has an additional boolean option 'recursive'. When set
to true, and when supported, fs.watch will return notifications for
the entire directory tree hierarchy rooted at the specified path.
Flags and modes aren't the same, symlinks are followed in all of the
path but the last component, docs should say something about what the
mode argument is for and when its used, fs.openSync should point to the
function that contains the docs for its args, as fs.writeSync does.
Prior, strings would first be converted to a Buffer before being written
to disk. Now the intermediary step has been removed.
Other changes of note:
* Class member "must_free" was added to req_wrap so to track if the
memory needs to be manually cleaned up after use.
* External String Resource support, so the memory will be used directly
instead of copying out the data.
* Docs have been updated to reflect that if position is not a number
then it will assume null. Previously it specified the argument must be
null, but that was not how the code worked. An attempt was made to
only support == null, but there were too many tests that assumed !=
number would be enough.
* Docs update show some of the write/writeSync arguments are optional.
On Linux, positional writes don't work when the file is opened in
append mode. The kernel ignores the position argument and always
appends the data to the end of the file.
To quote the man page:
POSIX requires that opening a file with the O_APPEND flag should have
no affect on the location at which pwrite() writes data. However, on
Linux, if a file is opened with O_APPEND, pwrite() appends data to the
end of the file, regardless of the value of offset.
Use a default callback if the user omitted one. Avoids errors like the one
below:
fs.js:777
if (err) return callback(err);
^
TypeError: object is not a function
at fs.appendFile (fs.js:777:21)
at Object.oncomplete (fs.js:297:15)
This commit fixes the behavior of fs.lchmod(), fs.lchown() and fs.readFile()
when the callback is omitted. Before, they silently swallowed errors.
Fixes#4352.
Before this commit, `fs.unwatchFile(path)` removed *all* listeners for `path`.
The function is overloaded now: `fs.unwatchFile(path)` still removes all
listeners, but `fs.unwatchFile(path, cb)` lets you remove a specific listener.
Fixes#3660.