Issue #19347 has been updated by kjtsanaktsidis (KJ Tsanaktsidis). I have definitely wanted this before FWIW. The main use-case I've had for this feature is writing code to look at things in the `/proc` filesystem on Linux. If a process exits, its pid can be re-used, and so the same path in `/proc` can now refer to a totally different process! To operate on `/proc` safely, you need to open the the `/proc/#{pid}` directory first, and use `openat(2)` to open individual files from within that directory. If the process exits, the directory suddenly becomes empty, so your operations will begin failing with `ENOENT`. Even if a new process is started with the same pid, the entry in `/proc` has a different inode, so you will never accidentally read a different process's data. ---------------------------------------- Feature #19347: Add Dir.fchdir https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/19347#change-101255 * Author: jeremyevans0 (Jeremy Evans) * Status: Open * Priority: Normal ---------------------------------------- Recently, I was working on a program that passes file descriptors over UNIX sockets (using `send_io`/`recv_io`). For file/socket/device descriptors, this works fine using `File#reopen`. However, I found that while Ruby supports `Dir#fileno` to return a directory file descriptor, it cannot use that file descriptor when changing directories. I worked around this in my program by writing the directory path over the UNIX socket, but this results in a TOCTOU vulnerability in certain cases. Passing the directory file descriptor would be simpler and avoid the vulnerability. I've submitted a pull request to implement this method: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/7135 -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/