On Sat, 15 Jan 2000 Horst von Brand <vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl> wrote:
>
> david.madore@ens.fr (David Madore) said:
> > Bruce Janson has pointed out to me the following interesting fact:
> > whereas some people have been criticizing as "un-unixy" my proposal to
> > admit hard links between directories, it was actually permitted in the
> > very first versions of Unix, as shown in the following transcript of a
> > test I just made:
>
> On some ancient VAX version of Ultrix this was also possible in some cases.
> It was useful mostly for creating headaches later on, like undeletable
> directories, but unlink worked on directories too... Nice to have if you
> managed to loose .. somewhere, though. Mandatory fsck(8) afterwards. If
> this "feature" was removed later, it was probably just an oversight (aka
> bug). AFAIK, no Unix had other than the current reference counting garbage
> collection anyway, without which this won't ever work.
For what it's worth, SunOS 4.1.4 would also let you do this. The 'ln'
command wouldn't, but if you were super-user, /usr/etc/link would allow you to
make hard-links to directories, and /usr/etc/unlink would allow you to unlink
them.
I played with them somewhat, and never found anything that it broke by
hard linking directories, fsck seemed to handle it fine. Unlinking a directory
where there were still files and it was the last link would of coarse orphan
those files.
I never found any use for this capability that couldn't equally well have
been served with a sym-link, but it was there.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jan 23 2000 - 21:00:14 EST