Hi. This patch adds handling for the error, ESTALE, to the system calls which take pathnames as arguments. The algorithm used is to detect that an ESTALE error has occurred during an operation subsequent to the lookup process and then to unwind appropriately and then to perform the lookup process again. Eventually, either the lookup process will return an error or a valid dentry/inode combination and then operation can succeed or fail based on its own merits. A partial list of the updated system calls are stat, stat64, lstat, lstat64, mkdir, link, open, access, chmod, chown, readlink, utime, utimes, chdir, chroot, rename, exec, mknod, statfs, inotify, setxattr, getxattr, and listxattr. Due to common code factoring, other system calls may have been included too, but were not explicitly tested. Thanx... ps Signed-off-by: Peter Staubach