Matthew Jacob wrote:
> 
> Perhaps I'm being obtuse but isn't what you want readily available
> via fstat? In fact, the lookup operation *is* separate from the open
> call.

The lookup operation is separate in the kernel, but not in userland
(unless you NFS export the partition and do file access via an NFS
client in your own code, rather than syscalls, I suppose...)

Also, as I mentioned before, how do you get a file handle on a symlink?