Stephan von Krawczynski <skraw@ithnet.com> writes:
> All that can handle symlinks already have the same problem
> nowadays. Where is the difference?
lstat() will tell you if a file is a symlink; if you only walk into
directories, then you're guaranteed not to get into a loop. If you've
got two hardlinks to a directory, how do you make that available in
stat() output, and how does a tree-walking program know which to walk
into? You could do the rsync trick of keeping track of every
device-inode pair you've seen to detect hardlinks, but that's horribly
non-space-efficient on large directories -- particularly bad for
backups.
I could imagine this functionality maybe being useful for system
administrators, but with normal Unixish userspace, it doesn't strike
me as a good idea to give users the ability to create hardlinks to
directories.
-- Adam Sampson <azz@us-lot.org> <http://offog.org/> - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Aug 07 2003 - 22:00:23 EST