> There are programs that use link to a file as a way of doing file
> locking. This is a time-honored Unix technique, which avoids assuminig
> that OS's have correctly implemented flock() and fcntl(), and/or for
> remote filesystems (read: NFS) where flock() or fcntl() aren't
> necessarily gauranteed to work. By changing the semantics of link(),
> you will break some programs that have been very carefully written to be
> portable to as many Unix systems as possible, including non-POSIX
> systems.
>
> The real qualm which I've heard is the quota issue, and the "rm
> --truncate" idea seems to be the best way of solving that problem. The
> second-best way is one where if a user notices that their quota doesn't
> go down, they complain to the sysadmin, which manually runs "find" as
> root, expunges the file, and then (if necessary) expunges the user who
> made the hard link.
>
> BTW, this is not a new problem. Time-sharing BSD systems have had this
> property for a very long time (over a decade), and people have
> survived.....
That this thread continues is amazingly disgusting. There is _NO_ reason
not to just add a simple mount option. It won't add more than 50 lines of
code. Who cares if it breaks something, I'm not making you use it. I'd
rather like to use it on my system. I don't want users locking files that
they don't own anyways.
Greg Alexander
http://www.cia-g.com/~sietch/