Bug 25460

There appears to be a general problem in FreeBSD with access to INODE's though editors and miscallaenous command line programs. For example, you can edit an INODE directly by typing "vi /etc", which will not work on most other UN*X OS's. Some programs such as edit, more and less do alert you that it is a directory, but many programs such vi, joe and cat do not. I am not quite sure why this is, or even if it is a bug, but it has caused some interesting problems such as the one described below.

If you are going to install a new kernel and decide to move your old modules directory out of the way first, when you perform a "make install" you will see that a new modules directory is not made; instead all of the modules are appended to a file called /modules. However, if you perform a mkdir manually first, it works. In other words, some portion of the "make install" is not checking for a directory and simply starts appending to a file instead. If you don't understand, try my steps about how to repeat the problem.

How-To-Repeat: vi /etc

--- or ---

cd /usr/src/sys/compile/kernel_name
rm -rf /modules
make install
less /modules