Yes, I'm inclined to agree with you on both points.
AFAIK there is no other syscall that does that. I agree that it's not very
pretty.
Cheers,
Michael
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Michael Kerrisk
maintainer of Linux man pages Sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7
Want to help with man page maintenance? Grab the latest tarball at
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/manpages/
read the HOWTOHELP file and grep the source files for 'FIXME'.
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