Hmm.. I was a bit tired recently, and thought about something like a
new syscall to open an _inode_, but later realised that it could be
done with a flag to open(), maybe O_INODE, O_NOFOLLOW, or whatever.
Does that sound too ill? If it fits into VFS somehow, it could be
a quick solution to:
- changing flags/attributes on device special files
- changing attributes on symlinks (currently can't set immutable for
instance)
- and in general, making fchmod() and other fwhatever() work on
symlinks, and device special files.
The kernel is already doing this for some things that needs to work
on symlinks et al.
For extreme sillyness, we could have an usable funlink() too. :)
-- Janos - Don't worry, my address works. I'm just bored of spam.