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From: rlk@think.com (Robert Krawitz)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: BSD file system
Message-ID: <31015@news.Think.COM>
Date: 21 Oct 89 18:29:19 GMT
References: <1344@accuvax.nwu.edu> <31003@news.Think.COM>
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Reply-To: rlk@think.com (Robert Krawitz)
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Organization: Thinking Machines Corp., Cambridge MA
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In-reply-to: dm@odin.think.com (Dave Mankins)

In article <31003@news.Think.COM>, dm@odin (Dave Mankins) writes:

]Symbolic links are just like hard links only with the ability to span
]filesystems (and, sadly, without the ability to know that, when you remove
]one name for a file (the target of the symbolic link) there is another name
]left dangling without a reference).

I find it more convenient to think of a symlink as nothing more than a
pointer to a named point in the filesystem.  A hard link (remember, each
file is really a link) is a pointer to an inode (a filesystem object),
whereas a symlink is a pointer to a name.
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